


Once a Fair and Stately Palace

by rainydayrambling



Category: Captive Prince - C. S. Pacat
Genre: Alternate Universe - Victorian, Ghosts, M/M, POV Laurent (Captive Prince), Sexual Content, Sharing a Bed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-31
Updated: 2020-05-31
Packaged: 2021-03-03 02:55:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 34,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24477562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainydayrambling/pseuds/rainydayrambling
Summary: Laurent is the sole surviving member of the de Vere family after a fire breaks out in his manor home.  Months after the fire, though, he is forced to admit that not all of his family is gone from the house.  He invites Damen, an old friend of his brother's, to France to help him deal with the haunting -- but in order to get the help he needs, he must be honest with Damen about the exact nature of the haunting, opening the door to new feelings and experiences.
Relationships: Damen/Laurent (Captive Prince)
Comments: 34
Kudos: 74





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from "The Haunted Palace" by Edgar Allan Poe.
> 
> A few content warnings in case you're concerned:
> 
> There is no child sexual assault in this story, however Laurent does still suffer some sexual assault at the hands of his uncle as an adult, and this is referenced, though never graphically described.
> 
> There will be consensual sexual content more graphically described in later chapters, though it is not, to my mind, explicit in the way it sometimes is, which is why this fic has a rating of Mature instead.
> 
> Sometimes some vaguely spooky stuff happens, but I don't think it is ever really outright scary. However, there are a few moments, throughout, of violence. In a similar vein, before the events of the story, there was a fire which resulted in several deaths, and this is mentioned many times throughout the story.
> 
> There are era-typical references to homophobia, but I wasn't interested in delving into it, so it mostly doesn't affect the characters at all.

The day outside the manor windows looked the same as most days: gray and wet.

In a charitable mood, one might call it picturesque. The vast green fields extended in every direction, broken up only by the occasional tree, all of which were, in a charitable mood, rather lovely with their twisting, twining limbs. In the evenings, as the air changed over from muggy and warm to crisp and cool, their silvery leaves shivered and rustled. Inside the manor, the air smelled dusty and old, the paper-and-leather scent of books. Outside would be the verdant scent of summer. In a charitable mood, one might say that the world outside the windows was like a painting you could step into, all soft lines and vibrant colors.

But Laurent de Vere did not find himself in a particularly charitable mood.

As he finished dressing and regarding the world out of the window, he could already hear the banging and shuffling coming from the library a floor below. These early morning sounds had become customary, over the last two weeks, and yet, he had not gotten used to them. There had been nothing but unbroken silence for months, nearly a year, and it had been harder than anticipated to adjust to the presence of a living soul in the house, beyond himself and the few servants he had kept on.

Jord, Paschal, and Vannes all knew the value of peace and quiet. At the very least, they knew the value of peace and quiet to Laurent. And they knew better than to disturb it. Lord Damianos Akielos had yet to learn that lesson.

There came a quiet knock on the door. Laurent knew it would be Jord, his butler, by that respectful knock alone. Certainly it could not have been Damianos, who could still be heard knocking around downstairs.

"Come," Laurent said, standing in front of the one mirror in the room to run a brush quickly through his hair. His mother had instilled in him if not an appreciation for his own beauty, then at least a respect for it. It, like this house, had to be kept up and cared for, and as he was the only one left to do it, the responsibility fell to him. He regarded his own upkeep with the same detached resolve with which he took care of the house.

Jord pushed the door open enough to only just step inside the room, never presuming that Laurent would just as soon have had him sitting on the bed to deliver his morning announcements. Laurent, for a moment, felt a pang of pain to see him hovering, as though he weren't the closest thing to family that Laurent had left. But it was not how things were done, to invite the servants into the room like old friends, no matter the emotional truth.

"Your breakfast has been set out in the solarium, as you requested, sir," Jord said.

Laurent nodded. He set down the brush -- if anyone had noticed that he'd been using his mother's hair brush for the past months, none of them had mentioned it to him -- and turned to face Jord.

"And Damianos?" he asked. The erstwhile lord from Greece had only occasionally joined Laurent for meals, and breakfasts in particular he often left by the wayside. His likelihood to take a morning meal, from the best that Laurent could tell, seemed to be attached to whether or not he had been up all night "working." Since the banging and rustling had only begun this morning, albeit in the early hours, Laurent guessed that for today, he would be sharing his meal with his -- guest, he supposed, for lack of a better word.

"Lord Damianos says he would be pleased to join you, sir," Jord said, and if there was a hint of some teasing tone in his voice, in the corner of his eye, Laurent ignored it.

For some reason, all of the staff seemed to regard Laurent differently whenever he mentioned Damianos. Laurent was not simple. He knew what they must expect. And he could admit in the privacy of his own mind that their assumptions were not entirely inaccurate.

When Damianos had first arrived on the doorstep, he had looked somehow both harried and exacting in his traveling clothes. He was, perhaps, the largest man Laurent had ever seen, though his bulk was all in his shoulders, his arms, the legs hidden by his custom-made trousers. His face, too, was fine and strong with his classically handsome features and a pair of deep brown eyes that looked down at Laurent with warmth that seemed to spill out of them and into the chilly day.

Laurent was not too proud to admit, to himself, that his mouth had gone a little dry looking at him, and if he'd believed in the devil, he might have thought that the fiend had sent this particular man to Laurent purely to test and tempt him.

But all of that had been before Damianos had opened his mouth, before he had begun to make just-this-side-of-polite comments about the state of the manor, before he had spoken Auguste's name so casually, as though the two of them had been close up until the moment Auguste had been taken from Laurent, even though Laurent had never heard his brother mention this man before.

It wasn't a lie, of course, that Damianos had known Laurent's brother. That was how Laurent had known to contact Damianos: he had found letters among Auguste's other papers, letters from Damianos that clearly referenced other letters that he had received from Auguste. It seemed they had met during Auguste's Tour, when he'd come of age -- a period of some weeks, the longest of Laurent's life (and, he would have said until a few months ago, the worst) -- and that they had spent some considerable time together. Enough, at least, to keep a correspondence. Not, apparently, enough to tell Laurent about.

Laurent had felt betrayal when he'd discovered the letters, brittle and fragile as old paper. It hurt him to feel as though Auguste had intentionally kept something from him, and it ached to know that now he could never ask his brother why.

He could admit now, many days later, that this feeling had led him to treat Damianos less than hospitably during the earliest days of his visit. He had come to France all the way from Greece to help Laurent with this -- problem -- on no more than a letter of his own, an invocation of Auguste's name, and a plea, grudgingly given, for help.

But Laurent had treated him coldly upon his arrival, because of that lingering sense of betrayal, and also out of self-preservation, to keep himself from giving anything away with a flush to his face or a warm tone to his voice.

Damianos accepted this graciously, or so Paschal, and later Jord, had insisted to Laurent. He seemed to chalk his cold reception up to the fact that Laurent had recently lost everyone he'd ever loved, that he was living in the house where they had all died together, leaving him behind, and that this sort of thing could change a person. So if Laurent was curt, sharp, rude, and even mean -- well, who could blame him? He had been through a lot. And all of that before his new problem had begun.

Hearing this from Paschal, it had been almost enough to make Laurent feel guilty.

Only then the banging and knocking about had started, the long days occupying the library -- which had previously always been Laurent's favorite place in the house -- and the ceaseless, noisy nights which kept Laurent lying awake in his bed, where he'd already been having quite enough trouble falling, and then staying, asleep. Given everything.

After those first few days, as Damianos became more settled into the house, Laurent's feelings changed: no longer did he treat Damianos unfairly. Now he had every legitimate reason under the sun to scorn him.

In addition to being loud, he was brash and bold and always ready to go toe-to-toe with Laurent in any arena, which Laurent found utterly infuriating.

There was no way to put him off -- no crass word or caustic remark that could sway him, save one: cruelty. That worked like a charm. But Laurent only resorted to that when his heart pulled painfully in his chest, and he needed Damianos to stop speaking or working or looking so innocently lovely at a moment's notice, or else he would really lose his grip on himself and then where would they be?

To make matters worse, Laurent remained unconvinced that Damianos even knew what he was doing.

That the supernatural did exist, and that the problem Laurent now faced had its roots in it, he no longer had any doubt. He had, at first, believed his experiences to be born of grief, of course. And then perhaps some lasting trauma in his head, after experiencing the horrors he had been through. He might have gone on believing this indefinitely, if the others hadn't begun to come to him with tales of their own.

Finally, he'd been forced to accept his experiences for what they were: some sort of shifting of the veil. And so he had sought help. Of course, he couldn't afford for everyone in France to know that the sole remaining de Vere had lost his wits. He'd been forced to seek help through means outside of his usual set. That was how he had come to write to Damianos, whose letters to Auguste referenced certain supernatural events having taken place in his own life, and who had boasted in these letters of taking the matter thoroughly and effectively into his own hands.

It had been desperation that had made Laurent reach out to him. And now it was a different sort of thing altogether that kept Damianos here, despite having made no tangible progress whatsoever with Laurent's problem.

Laurent left his room that morning with a headache already burgeoning. He lifted his hands to rub circles into his temples, but then he stopped and lowered them back to his sides instead. He did not want to be caught unawares by Damianos, showing any sort of weakness.

His father had ingrained in him that a de Vere was infallible. His uncle had taught him the importance of that infallibility. If it had been only the servants with him in the house, it would have been one thing. They were like family to him, especially now. But there was also Damianos, and -- and something else, possibly someone else, and whoever that might have been, Laurent doubted their sight would be stopped by such human barriers as walls and stairs.

He suppressed a shiver and hurried down into the solarium. This had been his mother's space, and in a way that had nothing at all to do with the supernatural, he felt her presence there. After long, sleepless nights, it soothed him to take his morning meal in the bright sun, surrounded by the plants and flowers his mother had doted on while she'd been alive.

The solarium was a large enough room, all windows on three sides, except for the doorway where it attached to the rest of the house. But there were so many plants crammed into the room that it felt as though it nearly burst with them.

In the center sat one small white iron table, with just enough space for four people to sit around it. Just Laurent's mother, his father, Auguste, and himself. Laurent had countless happy memories of the four of them taking breakfasts and midday meals here together, especially from his earlier childhood.

Only when his uncle had moved in with them, there hadn't been room for them all. They had begun to take more and more of their meals in the large, dark dining room. Laurent had always hated that room, not always with legitimate reason, though nobody could argue that point now.

This morning, the table in the solarium had been set for two, but Damianos had not yet arrived. Maybe he would get wrapped up in whatever he was doing and forget to come down. Wishful thinking. Laurent didn't think it possible that Damianos had ever forgotten a meal.

Sure enough, Laurent had no sooner sat and poured himself a cup of tea from the pot than Damianos entered the room -- “Lord Akielos,” Laurent greeted him, out of habit -- looking entirely too big to fit inside, let alone on one of the petite chairs that circled the table. But he sat opposite Laurent, looking cheerful, and said, with rather a large grin on his face for this early in the morning, "I don't think you're being entirely honest with me."

Laurent blinked through his shock for one second, and then two. "Excuse me?" 

"I've been working on this for two weeks," Damianos said, "and I've made no progress. Either this is all some sort of elaborate joke," here he paused to look at Laurent in such a way that suggested he doubted Laurent possessed the correct qualities to carry off an elaborate joke, or any kind of joke for that matter, "or you're lying to me."

Before Laurent could open his mouth in indignation, Damianos raised his hand to stop him from speaking, and then he went on himself. "Holding back information," he amended. “Necessary information.”

Laurent bristled, and he didn't try to hide it. "If you can't do the job, all you need to do is tell me and I will -- happily -- find someone who can."

But Damianos shook his head. "No one is going to be able to do this without knowing what's really going on here."

"I told you," Laurent said. He made sure to drain his voice of emotion as he spoke. His words were the waxy leaves of a tree, and all emotion was rainwater trailing off of them and down into the mud. "I was outside, reading. I'd heard the bell for dinner, but I didn't want to stop, so I decided to stay until I finished. A few minutes later, I saw the smoke."

He drew in a deep breath. He had lost and gained everything that day. Every piece of what had happened, every piece of the story, was a shard of glass, uniquely shaped and honed to cut him in a different way. But he pushed on, because he had spent enough time with Damianos by now that he knew the man would only wait patiently until he did so.

"I was too far away to hear anything. I ran back to the house. Smoke was pouring out from everywhere but I went in anyway. I hadn't seen anyone else yet, and when I got inside I realized the smoke was coming from the dining room."

He could feel the pressure building in him as he spoke, and he knew it would all come spilling out of him if he didn't take a moment to compose himself. He looked at Damianos, who sat across the table quietly listening, his face arranged to appear sympathetic, though Laurent didn't know whether he bought it. Laurent picked up the cup of tea in front of him and sipped from it, using the moment of silence to firm up his own composure.

"I opened the doors, that's how I got the burns on my hands."

Damianos nodded. He had looked over Laurent's scars briefly when he'd first arrived, but as they hadn't had much to do with Laurent's current problem -- except that they had been caused at the same time, by the same event -- he'd dismissed them without much investigation.

"Inside was all fire and smoke. I couldn't see anything. The only sound was the roar of the flames. It was like," here Laurent paused, reliving it despite himself, "like a wall of heat," he settled on. But that wasn't quite right. Even then, there had been the feeling of otherness about it. But that may only have been the terror, a consuming feeling the likes of which he had never before felt. He'd thought he'd known what fear was. He thought he'd had things to fear, before. And maybe he had.

Because what he felt standing in that doorway was something that soared above what fear could be. When he opened the door onto those flames, he opened the door to horror. And even as the heated metal of the door handles scorched and scarred the palms of his hands, the horror bit into him, burrowing and making a home of his body. He would never be rid of it now.

"I tried to get inside," Laurent went on, forcing the words out. "I tried to push past it and get to them. I knew they had to be in there, all of them. I had to find -- them. But I couldn't. The fire was so hot and bright, I could feel it scorching me, but I could also feel it hurting my eyes. Not  _ hurting  _ them. Damaging them. I couldn't see anyone, and then I felt that I couldn't see anything at all. I thought I heard --" he stopped, remembering that he hadn't told Damianos this before. But it was too late to stop now, so he went on. "I thought I heard Auguste call to me."

"What did he say?" Damianos asked. He seemed to understand that if he gentled his voice at all, Laurent would fall apart. Instead, he asked it in a perfunctory way, practical and toneless, and Laurent appreciated it.

"Just my name," Laurent said. "And then:  _ go _ . I think I turned around then. I don't really remember what happened next. I just remember falling down the front steps outside."

"Was anyone else there?"

"Not for the first couple of minutes. I waited. To see if anyone would come out. There was no one. And then Jord and the others came from around the back of the house. They had been in the kitchen downstairs. That was why they made it out. No one else did."

"How many?" Damianos asked, for perhaps the thirtieth time since his arrival.

"Ten, in all. My -- my family. And six servants." His stomach churned, and he forced himself to take another sip of tea. The bandages had come off his hands months ago, of course, but the scarring on his palms still made his movements stiff, and he felt them pull as he curled his fingers around the handle of the cup.

Damianos nodded to himself as he thought over all of this. He'd heard it all before. The only new piece was that Laurent had heard -- had thought he'd heard -- his brother speak to him, before he stumbled out of the house.

When Damianos spoke again, it was to ask the question Laurent knew would come eventually, the question everyone always asked. "Laurent," he said, and then corrected himself at the flicker of feeling on Laurent's face: "Lord de Vere. Why don't you just leave? You could still fetch a decent sum for the house. Sell it, move away. You have the means. Why stay in this place?"

"This is my home," Laurent said, this answer easy for the number of times he had said it. Even people who had no notion of the most compelling reason there was to leave seemed to think it was a given that Laurent would want to, that he would turn from this place at the first opportunity and never look back. They seemed to think he would escape the memories that way.

Laurent knew better. What had happened would haunt him wherever he went. And in any case, he wasn't entirely convinced that whatever else was here wouldn’t follow him.

There was one other reason. And this he hadn't spoken aloud to anyone. Should he tell Damianos now?

Tell him what he had begun to suspect more and more, that this was not a straightforward case, but something more complicated, more complex. That there might be two -- no. Laurent couldn't explain all of that.

If he couldn't tell Jord or Paschal, he certainly couldn't bring himself to tell this absolute wall of a man, whose similarities to a brick structure did not end with his size but rather the fact that he was just as difficult to put off. Laurent had never met anyone so stubborn. Except himself, maybe. That thought had the feeling of Auguste about it. Laurent shook it off.

To Damianos, he said simply, "It's mine," and hoped his own pause had been short enough that Damianos understood he meant the house, though even to his own ear, it sounded as though he might have meant that, and more.

Whether or not he believed this, Damianos accepted it. He didn't push the subject any further. Instead, he said, "Tell me again about the occurrences."

Laurent took another sip of his tea. Across the table, Damianos had been eating heartily, but Laurent found it difficult to conjure an appetite while he talked about this. Or thought about it. It had been difficult, in fact, to conjure an appetite at all since the fire, though he made himself eat enough to keep in shape at least. He took a bite of buttered bread and thought while he chewed.

He had so far been careful with what he'd told Damianos about his experiences. He'd told him the basics that could happen anywhere in the house: things going missing, sounds that didn't seem attached to anything, patches of cold air that he and occasionally one of the others would walk through unwittingly. He'd told about the creaking floorboards and stairs, all of which had started only after the fire.

What he had not told Damianos about were the more -- private occurrences, those things which seemed only to happen in his own personal rooms. Most of the others stayed out of there in general. They would poke their heads in when he was needed, or go in during the day to tidy up and clean. But for the most part, he was alone in his own rooms.

At least, he had been. 

But since the fire, it had become increasingly impossible for him to feel as though he were alone anywhere, and in his bedroom least of all.

It could happen at any time of day -- a flash of an image in a mirror, the papery sound of a book being slid back into place on a shelf even though none of them had moved, faint traces of the scent of smoke -- but it was the worst at night. Because night was when he felt it: the cool touch of fingers on his brow, brushing through his hair, pushing down beneath the blankets on his bed.

Sometimes it would stop there -- stop suddenly, as though compelled, or forced away. Very often this happened. But sometimes it didn't. And when it didn't, the touching would go on. Laurent would try to will himself to stand, to throw off the covers and get up, get out, sleep in the library if he had to, or forego sleep altogether, because even walking half-awake through his day would be better than lying there and enduring it.

Only he could never force himself to move. He didn't know if it was terror that stopped him. He had never been one to fear so much and so ferociously that it stopped him from doing what needed to be done. It felt like a force outside himself, though he could see that nothing held him down.

Fortunately it seemed that the phantom touch could only do so much. Laurent didn't know why. It would reach the place between his legs and hover there, but seem unable to move any further. Laurent did take some comfort in this, except that it seemed to grow bolder and more successful by the night. If it wasn't stopped, the thing made it slightly further in its explorations of Laurent's body, inching along night by night. There was no way to know what its goal was, or when it would stop -- if it would ever stop.

It filled him with panic, this thing, in a way that nothing ever had, except the fire itself. Even that, while horrible, had been something he understood. Easy for a candle to fall, for the flame to catch on the tablecloth, a napkin, a curtain. Easy for it all to go up in a moment, blocking the exit, trapping everyone inside.

But this, whatever Laurent was facing now, was all unknown to him. He hadn't told anyone about it. How could he? 

Damianos regarded him from across the table as he thought through all of this. He didn't push Laurent to speak before he was ready, but he didn't turn his gaze away either. He was unrelenting, in his own way, but calm. Something about his manner, his composure, made it easier for Laurent to decide to tell him. This man would not force him to tell the truth. But if Laurent chose to do it, maybe he would have a better chance of doing what he had come here to do.

"You're right," Laurent said finally. "I've been holding certain details back from you. But I can't discuss it here."

Damianos nodded. "Where?"

Laurent considered. He felt the crawling sensation of being watched, another aspect of life in the manor after the fire. "Outside," he said. There, at least, he believed he could not be followed.

He had not necessarily meant to go right that moment, but Damianos stood from his place at the table, finishing off his own tea in one great swallow as he moved. Laurent, jittery with nerves and trying not to show it, finished his tea as well and, with a niggling feeling at the corner of his mind, picked up his bread to bring with him.

His mother's solarium let out into a dark hallway, which eventually fed into the grand foyer that made up the central hub of the manor. To the west, the rest of the house was blocked off.

Ostensibly, this was due to the damage done by the fire, and it was true that Laurent hadn't gotten around to hiring anyone to repair what damage had been done, though really most of it had been contained to the dining room itself. He hadn't needed to block off the entire wing. Not for safety anyway.

But he couldn't bear to be there, so close to where everything had happened. So close to where his parents, and his brother, had died. And with his reduced staff, there was no reason to keep an entire empty section of house open and running. It would only create more work for them for no reason. So it had been an easy decision to block it off.

Damianos had been told, by Paschal, that the west side of the house had been damaged by the fire and that no one was to go inside. Laurent had been told, by Paschal, that Damianos said he may well need to go inside in order to do what Laurent had asked him here to do. He'd barely been here an hour and he'd already begun arguing.

Laurent had let Damianos know that if he truly needed to be allowed entrance into the west wing, he could explain his reasons to Laurent and Laurent would make the decision. He hadn't heard anything about it since, and he suspected Damianos had only said it to be contrary.

Outside, the day was much the same as it had appeared through Laurent's bedroom window. Damianos followed him out, for once not speaking, and Laurent found himself appreciating the silence, the chance to allow some of the crawling, itching anxiety to leach out from beneath his skin and into the cool morning.

A soft drizzle of rain came down from the blanket of gray sky overhead, but the lack of direct sun seemed to bring out the green of the rolling, gently sloping lawns around the house. Here and there, small, twisted trees dotted the grass.

On a warmer, sweeter day, Laurent might have come out here, alone, with a book from the library (blessedly located on the east side of the house, so that at least one thing Laurent loved had not been taken by the fire) to sit under one of those trees and read for hours.

Today, however, he led Damianos across the sprawling grounds to the line of dark trees perched to the north of the house. “Perched” was perhaps not the right word. It gave the impression of lightness, of freedom. The ability to lift off into the air and be someplace new in a heartbeat. These woods, on the other hand, were deep and dark and heavy. They were solid, immovable, a force all their own. Powerful.

They were not, for all of this, frightening to Laurent. He had lived here in this manor, on these grounds, the entire length of his life. They were, as he had told Damianos over breakfast, his. His own.

He felt it now more than ever, after the fire. This place belonged to him, and he belonged to it. He could not pick himself up and fly away from it any more than the forest itself could.

This was their place, their little patch of earth, together.

He had always felt a sort of kinship with these woods, these trees. In a way, he felt, they were his protectors. Or at the very least his companions. Dark and mysterious and dangerous, maybe, but connected to Laurent in a way he would have had trouble expressing. And certainly had no desire to express to Damianos.

He brought Damianos up to the edge of the wood, and then he sat himself down in the damp grass, beneath a limb heavy with leaves that would keep them from catching the worst of the rain. Damianos hesitated only for a moment -- his hesitation seemed to come less from wanting to avoid the wet grass himself, and more from surprise that Laurent hadn't been bothered by it -- before joining Laurent.

Laurent unfurled himself, setting one leg out in a straight line before him, cocking the other up so he could rest one wrist against it. He leaned back on his other hand, and hoped he looked carefree.

In reality, his blood pulsed and surged with fear and shame and some other hot, dark thing he didn't recognize. He didn't know how to tell Damianos what he had come out here to tell him. At the same time, it had been two weeks since Damianos had come to the house. Two weeks that Damianos had been working on Laurent's problem (and that he was working, Laurent could have no doubt, based on the racket he made as he did so) without making any apparent progress. In fact, Laurent could no longer ignore the fact that the situation was worsening.

He could have told Damianos it was pointless. He could ask him to leave at any time. He could even do it politely, as it was clear the man had given the problem his best effort. He could have tried to find someone else, someone he got on with better.

But that would mean _ finding _ someone else. Damianos was, if nothing else, the most convenient option by far. Laurent didn't personally know of anyone else with experience in this sort of thing. It would mean asking around or, God forbid, putting out ads. There would be no way to keep his name out of it, everyone knew about the manor and what had happened there, and who owned it. In the best case, it would be messy and difficult. Worst case, he would go from being pitied by everyone he came across to being mocked by them. Bad for business, and not particularly good for his ego, either.

No, Damianos was his best option, from every practical standpoint. But he had hit a wall, and he needed more from Laurent if he was to have any chance of success.

He seemed to intuitively understand that Laurent needed a few moments to gather his thoughts. He sat idly, apparently completely at ease in the wet grass. He looked at the trees, or the spaces between them, as though trying to glean through into the forest beyond, and then out across the grounds, by turns. Laurent watched him for a long moment.

When Damianos kept quiet, when he wasn't arguing or taunting or banging around in the library, it was entirely too easy to slip into admiring him. Purely physically, of course. Laurent didn't think he'd ever met a more infuriating person. But he was beautiful.

Laurent gave his head a little shake. "You look well here," he said, hearing his voice come out sounding as though he found this fact distasteful.

Damianos only laughed, this little laugh he had that sounded as though he were laughing to himself at Laurent's expense. Something in Laurent secretly delighted at the sound of it, for reasons that were well beyond his ability to grasp or understand, but he had taken to throwing little barbs at Damianos, trying to startle it out of him. Usually it worked.

"Lord de Vere," Damianos said, gently prompting, though still with that faint trace of amusement peeking out of his face, from beneath the simple words.

Laurent drew in a breath, making sure to hold his body in perfect stillness, not wanting to project the nerves he felt out into the open space between them. Finally, he spoke, to tell Damianos the full truth, in the hopes that in his hands, it would result in some lessening pressure.

"You were right," Laurent said again, as a way into the story, since it felt as though that might make it easier to talk about. "There are things I haven't told you."

Damianos nodded, as though to say  _ Thank you, I knew this _ . But he kept his mocking to this, and allowed Laurent to go on uninterrupted.

"When I told you that -- about what's happening," Laurent had still been unable to speak the words  _ ghost _ or  _ haunting _ aloud, not because they didn't feel real to him, but because they felt too real, "I allowed you to go on with the impression that there was nothing distinctive about it. That it was the same everywhere in the house. But that's not, precisely, true."

Laurent realized he had looked down at the vibrant grass and now glanced up to see that he had Damianos's undivided attention. He went on, forcing himself to maintain eye contact.

"The truth is that it seems to be primarily concentrated in my own rooms."

This visibly startled Damianos. Whatever he had been expecting Laurent to say, it hadn't been this. Still he didn't interrupt. He knew there would be more, and he waited to hear it.

This, of course, was the part Laurent had been dreading. But when he spoke the words, he heard them leave him utterly devoid of feeling, a cold and clinical statement of information.

"The -- haunting," he said, laying out each syllable of the word with precision, "manifests itself in the form of physical touch."

A small furrow to Damianos's brow. Of course, this would be the moment he didn't understand. "Physical touch?" he repeated.

"Of a carnal nature," Laurent said.

"Oh," Damianos said. And then, " _ Oh _ ."

"Yes," Laurent said. "You understand why I was not forthcoming."

To his credit, Damianos did not argue against this. He looked to be processing this new information, hopefully considering how he could take it and use it to better address the issue.

"But," Damianos began, "that means -- that is, your family--" He did not seem to know how to complete the thought.

"Yes," Laurent agreed. "Rather troubling."

Now Damianos looked concerned outright. "Did they -- did any of them--?"

"No," Laurent said, cutting him off before he could put the rest of the question in words. "Never," he said, "in life. But."

Here he hesitated. There were things he had never put in words himself, to anyone. He had made the decision to do so now, and Laurent was not one to back down from a decision, once made. But it was difficult, and Damianos waited patiently while he gathered himself.

"It never happened, before," he said, meaning before the fire, before the deaths. "But I think I know who --" he broke off, allowing himself a moment of weakness, during which time he breathed in the strong pine scent of the wood.

"My uncle," he began again, "came to live with us when I was thirteen. He never -- touched me inappropriately, or my parents would have thrown him out. My brother would have killed him, I think. And he knew it too. But he would watch me. Whenever we were alone in a room together, I would feel it. And he would make comments that were just this side of correct. It never went far enough that I felt like I had to tell anyone. I don't think I realized how much it affected me until he was gone. It was the one thing that came out of the fire that -- well, I felt a sense of relief, for a while. It had been oppressive, living every day beneath the weight of his attention. I think it amused him to know I was frightened of what he might do. I think he enjoyed finding the line of what would be acceptable or allowed and dancing all over it, but never crossing, so that I remained alone in my torment."

Laurent breathed through the sudden pressure in his chest, and took a moment to compose himself again, and to allow Damianos to school his features once more into professional curiosity, as they had taken a sudden and startling veer toward the emotional. But either he had less practice at this than Laurent or he had no desire to hide his reaction, because he allowed his face to go on showing his stark horror and sympathy.

"Anyway," Laurent said, desperate to be on the other side of this conversation, "it went on that way for years, although it seemed to lessen somewhat when I turned twenty. I thought I'd made it through to the other side. And then the fire, and now -- this." Whatever  _ this  _ was.

"You think it must be your uncle," Damianos said.

"It makes the most sense," Laurent agreed, glad to be back into the practical side of things. "He seems to grow bolder as time goes on, or stronger, or something. He's more successful night by night, whatever it is."

"This happens  _ every night _ ?"

Laurent shrugged, projecting a casual lack of care that he didn't truly feel. In fact, this reaction made him more afraid, since it gave the impression that such a thing happening so consistently was uncommon. "Not every night," he amended, "but most."

Damianos shifted then, holding himself more carefully than Laurent had ever seen him do before, as he sat up and leaned just slightly closer -- not as though he wanted to press into Laurent's space, but more like he wanted Laurent to physically see that he was engaged with this, that he cared about what Laurent was telling him. That he believed him.

"Laurent," Damianos said, his voice low and earnest and warm, and for once Laurent didn't correct him. "I'm going to help you," he said. "We're going to figure out what is going on here, and we're going to get rid of that bastard for good."

Laurent stared at him, taken aback by the ferocity of his sudden passion. And surprised too, by his own internal reaction, which he recognized after a beat or two with no sound but the rain on the leaves overhead: he believed that Damianos meant what he said, and he trusted that he would dedicate himself fully to the task.

"Thank you," he heard himself say, and then, to try to force himself back into the transactional, professional mode he had thus far been utilizing with his brother's old friend, he said, "Damianos," and held out his hand.

Damianos took it, but now his face relaxed back into that easy amusement, as though it was nothing to slip from one feeling to another openly. "Laurent," he answered as he shook Laurent's hand, a hint of a smile on his mouth. "Please, call me Damen."


	2. Chapter 2

That night, Damianos -- Damen -- carried all of his "equipment," as he called it, into Laurent's bedroom. He had been moving around the house with it at various times of day since he'd arrived two weeks previously. Ostensibly, he had been trying to locate the instances of the haunting. Since Laurent had, at that point, only told him about the glimpses and flashes and little noises here and there, he hadn't known that most of the energy had been concentrated around Laurent's own rooms.

He had been, for the most part, unsuccessful so far. He had seen things, enough to know that Laurent and the servants were accurate in their assessment that the fire which killed Laurent's family had indeed left them with a haunted manor. But not enough to know how to stop it. He insisted that what Laurent had told him that morning beneath the trees at the edge of the wood would change everything.

Now he knew not only where to look, but what to look for. Laurent only hoped he was right, and that this would help. It had cost him, to tell Damen the full truth of it, and he didn't think it would be worth it if it didn't come to anything.

Nevertheless, he found himself torn. Of course he wanted for Damen's equipment to find something, wanted for Damen to know he had been telling the truth, wanted for that truth to lead to -- something. Banishment of the entity, or whatever it was that Damen was specifically here to attempt. But another part of him half-hoped that Damen's presence would preclude the night's events entirely.

He knew he shouldn't, but he couldn't help hoping that whatever had been happening to him would stop if there was someone else in the room. He didn't say any of this to Damen. It wouldn't help him do his work, and therefore there was no reason to press the matter. No productive reason anyway.

Damen arrived at the door with his large arms bulging with bits and bobs that looked like little more than junk to Laurent, but Laurent stepped aside to let him in anyway.

It didn't take Damen long to set everything up. None of it was what Laurent had expected. He'd had ideas of magic artifacts from far-flung places, crystal balls and tarot cards, the types of things Auguste had once told him he'd seen in a fortune teller's shop during his Tour. Instead, Damen had mirrors and bits of cloth that could have been from anything, little pots of gray powder, and a small knife.

Laurent's attention focused on the little blade immediately, and he felt himself tense.

Damen noticed where his eyes had fallen and laughed. "Relax," he said. "It's not for you. Besides, if I wanted to subdue you, I wouldn't need that, believe me."

Laurent didn't doubt it, and despite himself, he swallowed as a wave of warmth ran through him at the idea of it, being pressed down into the mattress with Damen, all heat and solid muscle, over him, holding him down. He felt himself flush and turned his face to make sure Damen didn't see it, though the sun had already set and the only light in the room came from a handful of candles.

When Laurent spoke, his words were measured and even. "How is a knife meant to work on a ghost anyway?" he said, realizing as he said it that it was the first time, since the whole business began, that he'd spoken the word  _ ghost _ aloud.

But Damen shrugged. "Nothing," he said. "It was your brother's. We don't know if there's more than one ghost, and if so, how many, so I've been using little bits from everyone, just in case."

Laurent had stopped comprehending the words after Damen said the knife had belonged to Auguste. Of course, now Laurent recognized it, though it had been some time since he'd seen it. Auguste didn't carry it around. Hadn't, Laurent corrected himself. He hadn't carried it around. Their father had given it to him as a boy, trusting him with a weapon for the first time. He had given it to Auguste with the charge to look out for his little brother, and Auguste had taken that instruction seriously.

"He was always my protector," Laurent said, only truly realizing he was speaking the words out loud when he heard himself say them.

"Maybe he still is," Damen said.

Laurent looked up at him, startled. He had not told Damen his suspicions that Auguste had been here with him in addition to his uncle. He hadn't told him, because he hadn't wanted Damen to dismiss the idea out of hand. He still thought it might all be wishful thinking. He hadn't seen or felt anything to suggest that Auguste was still trapped in the house. Nothing, that was, except the fact that the evil, nighttime touches he had been forced to endure would sometimes stop before they really began, or seem to be torn away halfway through their explorations of him, or never come at all.

He didn't think he could have borne it, if Damen had dismissed the idea. So he hadn't said anything. Now it seemed Damen had come to the same hypothesis.

They had agreed earlier that day that there seemed to be more than one ghost haunting the house. Not least because there seemed to be more than one motive at work, even without the knowledge that while one entity was very committed to its torment of Laurent, there was at least a chance that another was committed to stopping it.

Beyond that, there was evidence of -- disagreement. A book might be taken from a shelf in the library, even tossed toward the fire as though something wanted to throw it in, and the next moment it would be back in its place on the shelf. Or, Damen had told Laurent earlier that day, he might have a sudden and inexplicable desire to wander out into the night alone, or go to some dark place in the house, a desire so powerful that he would feel himself start to move, as though compelled, only to then snap suddenly back to himself and be free to return to what he had been doing.

His conclusion was that there seemed to be at least two ghosts haunting the manor, and that they were at odds with each other: one of them wanted very badly for him to leave, and the other seemed to want him to stay. Or at least not to be hurt.

Laurent had his own suspicion about who else might still be here, lingering in the halls of the manor, in addition to his uncle. But he didn't allow himself to dwell on it, didn't allow himself to cling to the hope, and so he hadn't told Damen his thoughts. If Damen shared them, he didn't know, because Damen hadn't told him who he thought it might be either.

Perhaps they were both trying to spare Laurent's feelings. His admission of a moment before that it could be Auguste protecting him still from his uncle was the closest either of them had come to saying that Auguste may yet be here.

"Here," Damen said now, holding out the small knife to Laurent. "I only need it nearby, just in case. You can hold onto it."

The knife, sheathed and no longer than the palm of Damen's hand, looked almost harmless, innocent, and yet Laurent felt it penetrate the space between them in the room, an offering of peace in the form of a weapon. Laurent reached out and took it, felt the slender weight of it in his hand, and then, when Damen had turned around to arrange the rest of his things, Laurent quickly stashed it beneath the mattress on his bed. He knew it couldn't do him any real or practical good: he didn't know much about ghosts, but he doubted very much that they could be stabbed, and he didn't fool himself that he could best Damen in any sort of physical altercation, even if he did have a blade and Damen didn't. Still, it made him feel a little safer to know it was there.

It was late. The remaining servants had been dismissed for the night, gone off to their own rooms downstairs. Laurent had been staying awake later and later, hoping to avoid his nightly visitations. And of course, Damen had been working through most nights, trying to determine who, exactly, they were dealing with, and what they wanted, so that he could chase them off or release them, whatever it took to free them from the house.

They were both still dressed in the day's clothes, and for the first time Laurent allowed himself to wonder whether Damen planned to stay that way. But the plan would only work if Laurent, at least, got into bed, pretending that everything was normal.

Though he felt hesitant, he banished any sign of it from his movements as he lifted his hands to the buttons of his jacket. There were only two, so this was easy enough. He shrugged out of it and left it lying over the back of a chair. Vannes would fetch it in the morning.

Damen turned back around from organizing his equipment in time to see Laurent struggling with the buttons of his shirt. The scarring on his palms, and on the undersides of his fingers, sometimes kept him from managing more dexterous tasks on his own. They made his hands stiff, stole their flexibility. What should have been soft and supple flesh and springy, delicate muscle and tendon was instead hard and clumsy. Sometimes Laurent managed fine, but on the days when the scars stayed his hands, he usually had Paschal to help him. Of course, tonight he had sent Paschal away early, to avoid being asked too many questions about what Damen was doing in his bedroom.

He should have foreseen this being an issue. It was his own fault. He held his face very still, and he thought of cool things -- the shade under an ancient oak tree, rain against the windowpane -- to keep the flush out of his face. But he found he couldn't look at Damen.

That was fine. He focused instead on the buttons beneath his fingers, concentrating as he moved in slow, precise movements to free them. So he didn't see when Damen stepped closer, and then closer again, until he was standing right in front of Laurent, and his hands were on Laurent's hands, gently pulling them away.

Laurent startled at the touch of his warm fingers on the backs of Laurent's hands, but he didn't think it had shown in anything more than a quick stutter of breath. Now he did look up at Damen, to find the man looking down at him with a complicated expression on his face. Complicated because it held so much in it, not because he was trying to hide it. Laurent read many things in that expression, and he didn't know how to name any of them.

"Let me," Damen said, his voice low and warm.

Laurent felt himself sinking into that voice, and all he could do was nod in response.

So Damen released his hands, and Laurent kept them down at his sides. And then Damen's long, strong fingers lifted to the buttons of Laurent's shirt. He didn't move quickly, or efficiently. Rather, he kept his movements deliberate and slow, as though he savored every button as it slid from its place, parting the shirt in the wake of Damen's hands, heavy with intention.

Laurent wished he could watch them move without being too obvious, but since he couldn't, he instead watched Damen's face. He appeared as though he were concentrating, like this task required, if not skill, then at least dedication. Like it required the utmost care, to slip the buttons from their holes.

Although the shirt opened beneath his ministrations, Damen never touched Laurent, never so much as brushed against his skin with the back of his hand or a knuckle. Laurent was grateful -- he didn't know how he would take it if Damen touched him, he didn't know what he would do or how he would react, and he didn't want Damen to feel the way his heart pounded -- and he was frustrated. But this he pushed into the background of his mind and instead focused on the look of gentle -- fascination? -- on Damen's face, the heat of his body so close to Laurent's.

In Laurent's own body, something was happening that he had hardly felt before. For a long time, he had not thought himself capable of the desires that characterized the lives of many boys and young men. He had told this, once, to Auguste, several years earlier. He'd been worried and ashamed, afraid there had been something wrong with him. So he'd found his older brother out in the grounds, when no one would be able to overhear them, and he asked about it.

Auguste had only laughed, as he had been wont to do. He was a perpetually cheerful person, until something happened to make him angry. But he had never once been angry with Laurent, and so whatever might have been wrong with him, Laurent had felt no real qualms in talking to his brother about it.

And Auguste had been gentle with him in this as he was in all things. He'd explained that Laurent might not feel desire at all -- most people did, but Auguste had met some who didn't (Auguste seemed always to have met someone, or known someone, who could fit into any category under the sun). He'd explained that it may not be that at all. That Laurent might simply still be growing into himself in that way. And he'd explained that it could be Laurent had no desire for women, but that this did not necessarily mean he would not experience it at all.

Laurent had felt himself flush hard at that, but Auguste had wrapped his arm around Laurent's shoulders and walked with him in the bright sun. He'd told him that such things were far from unheard of. Laurent had snapped that he knew this already, that he wasn't stupid. But, "That's not what I mean," Auguste had said. He explained that he meant it happened often, that in general, people knew and didn't care when it did.

Their family had never been particularly religious. And there had never been any great need for Laurent to uphold any familial responsibilities, since they had Auguste for anything like that. As long as he was relatively discrete, Auguste said, no one would care what Laurent did, wherever he fell on the spectrum.

It had taken a long time for Laurent to realize how lucky he had been, to have Auguste in those early days as he figured out what went on beneath his own skin. Most didn't have anyone like that, to reassure them and protect them, to tell them that it was all right.

He leaned against that foundation now, as Damen's fingers worked the buttons of Laurent's shirt. He told himself Damen was only being helpful, that he had seen Laurent struggling because of the scars, and he'd wanted to help. But when he looked up into Damen's face, he found him staring back down at him, his lips parted and unguarded, his eyes wide and warm and welcoming.

Laurent allowed him to finish with the buttons, but then he took a step back, out of Damen's reach, and removed the shirt himself. "Thank you," he said, his voice curt and toneless. 

Damen gave him a little nod of a bow, and for once, it didn't come across as mocking. In fact, Laurent thought as he took what he hoped was a subtle second look, Damen seemed somewhat shaken.

Laurent moved to his wardrobe and threw a long nightshirt over his head before he removed his trousers, draping them with his other clothes over the chair. He was covered almost to the knees, but still, he was aware of how underdressed he suddenly found himself in comparison to Damen, who was, and would remain, fully clothed.

He didn't feel self-conscious exactly. At least, he didn't feel embarrassed. But he was extra aware of himself, aware of his body in a way that usually he was not. He could almost forget, sometimes, that he had a body at all. He was engaged primarily in his own mind, and the ways he could use it in the world around him. One of the most uncomfortable things about this situation was how much it rooted him in his own physical shell.

With this awareness came memories of his mother, telling him how beautiful he was -- his father, reminding him that in business, a man had to use any advantage he had to get and stay ahead. Only Auguste had never really spoken to Laurent of the way he looked. He may have had some pride over it, but it had only come out in small, caring ways if so.

Based on the look on Damen's face when Laurent had removed the shirt, he almost wondered whether he would say something now. But he didn't. He turned away before Laurent could get another look at his face, and he made his way over to the chair near the window, where he would be apparently spending the night.

While Damen's back was turned, Laurent slipped into his own bed, uncomfortably aware of how vulnerable he was.

"I can still have Jord bring up a pallet, or a cot," Laurent said. He was not, perhaps, prone to out of the blue kindnesses, but it felt strange to have Damen sitting in a chair while Laurent himself lay in bed.

Damen shook his head. "I would fall asleep," he said. He settled back into the chair, and he looked comfortable enough, Laurent supposed.

It was hard to imagine trying to sleep with Damen sitting right there, watching him, though. Laurent sank further down into his mass of blankets. Words raced through his head, little comments he might make, barbs he might throw at Damen just to see how he would react, what he would say in response. And he would have done it, except that it felt too obvious to him that he would be doing it from a place of his own discomfort. Trying to find solid ground to put his feet down on. What was more solid, after all, than being prickly and cruel, and forcing someone else to make room for it?

Only Damen would see right through it, and he would know what was really bothering Laurent, and Laurent couldn't bear that.

The result was that for a long moment, the two merely stared at each other from across the distance that separated them, a space of about six feet.

"I won't be able to sleep with you watching me like that," Laurent said.

"Then don't sleep," Damen said, with the smallest shrug to his massive shoulders. Utilitarian and direct as always.

Laurent did his best to muster up a disdainful look, and then he buried himself down into the mattress, pulling the heavy blankets up over him so that he could not see Damen anymore. In a moment, all of the candles had been put out, but one. Laurent had thought to leave them burning, so that Damen could see what was happening, if anything did happen. He doubted ghosts minded much one way or another. But there was relief that came with the darkness, relief from the sense of Damen's eyes on him, and Laurent felt himself relax a little.

He had meant it when he told Damen that he didn't think he'd be able to sleep, if he knew someone was watching him. When he glanced up over an edge of blanket, however, he found that Damen was not watching him, in so many words. He had helped himself to a book from one of Laurent's many bookshelves, and he was reading it by the light of the one remaining candle. At least, he was pretending to read it, and Laurent appreciated it, even if it was a ruse.

Besides, if he could fall asleep knowing that he was soon to feel the phantom touch of cool fingers trailing over the length of his body, then he supposed he could fall asleep in any conditions.

In the end, it only took a few moments before he felt himself drifting, and even though his first reaction was to fight against it, he remembered Auguste's knife under his pillow and allowed himself to be carried into sleep.

He didn't know how long he stayed there, or whether he made it all the way to dreaming. It was possible that he hovered, just on the other side of the line from wakefulness. He felt grass beneath his palms and his hands were uninjured. The grass felt the way it did before the fire, soft and cool in the summer sun.

When he pressed his hands to the trees of his forest, he felt the bark against them as it should have felt: rough and hard. Distantly, he was aware of the fact that it should not feel this way, not for him. He remembered, in a far-off place in his mind, that his hands were different now, that any sensation against his palms should be muted and dulled, felt only through a layer of -- something. But he didn't grasp after this line of thought. Instead he allowed it to float away, and he just enjoyed the day, the warm yellow sun on his face, the springy earth beneath his feet.

He was going somewhere, heading into a specific place in the wood, looking for something. No, not something. Someone. His brother? No, Auguste was gone. He didn't remember where. And then up ahead, Damen stepped out the trees.

Sunlight seemed to collect and gather around him, as though drawn to him. It caught in the dark curls of his hair, shining there. On his face he had a gentle smile, the one that accompanied the laugh Laurent loved and pretended not to love, though he wasn't laughing now. He held out his hand, and Laurent found himself moving quickly closer to him, almost not seeming to walk at all, but to glide across the grass. And then he fell forward, toward Damen, and when he put his hand in Damen's waiting one, that too felt different than it should have. Soft and warm, with no hint of the scars that should have been there.

Was Laurent dreaming, or imagining? It was hard to tell, and he stopped worrying about it, because as Damen took his hand, he drew Laurent closer, and closer, until finally he had folded Laurent against him, wrapping him into a strong embrace.

Laurent thought he might do something else -- though he did not allow himself, even in the dream, to imagine what that might be -- but he didn't. He merely held Laurent for a long moment, and Laurent seemed almost to melt against him. He felt warm and safe, protected in a way he hadn't felt for so long, but there was something else stirring beneath the safety too, some storm inside him that churned and gathered, readying itself to break out. It wasn't an unpleasant feeling. Like the anticipation of rain through a long, hot, heavy day.

Warmth rose to his cheeks, and his eyes were heavy. Laurent pulled back just enough to look into Damen's face -- but as soon as he moved, Damen changed, and when he looked up, it was no longer Damen standing so close to him, holding him, but his uncle.

Laurent startled, the feeling inside him yanked out with a wrench, gone so suddenly it made him sick. He tried to step back, to run back over the grass to the house, or better yet, into the trees, but his uncle's grip was too strong. He knew, distantly, that this should not have been the case. He had worked hard, over the years, to build strength in his body, so that he could fight his way out of just such a situation.

But as his palms were soft and smooth and uninjured, so was his body weak and untested. He couldn't get away, and there was no one here to help him, and the waiting trees alongside them could do nothing but bear witness.

Pointlessly, Laurent began to fight, and it was through this movement that he came back into his real body, which was attempting to do the same thing, wrapped up in the blankets on the bed in his family's house.

He had slept through the initial contact, which seemed always to start with his hair, brushing through it, brushing it away from his face, as though admiring it. He knew he ought to call out for Damen, but he couldn't bring himself to make a sound. Whether this was some supernatural control being exerted, or terror, or shame, he didn't know. But when he tried to speak, his voice gathered itself into a knot in his throat and he couldn't do it.

He could not move either, at least, not enough that he could pry himself up out of the bed and away. He'd tried this every night so far, and tonight was no exception. Perhaps he did it just in case it would work this time, but deeper down he knew that it was just a primal sort of fear that pushed him to do whatever he could to get away.

The cool, invisible fingers had trailed down his chest by now, pushing the blankets down and away from him as they went, and Laurent did his level best to thrash out of their path. The best he could manage, however, was to press his body deeper down into the mattress, and try as he might to make some sound, some way to alert Damen or even just to release his own fear and frustration, his voice remained shuttered to him.

But evidently he managed to make enough of a ruffle of the blankets that in a moment, Damen was there. Laurent heard him drop the book he had been reading and rush to the bed, speaking words Laurent did not immediately recognize. He thought at first that it was Latin, but no -- Greek, he corrected himself, in some distant and hazy part of his mind.

And then a strong, solid hand was wrapping around Laurent's arm and hauling him out of the bed, dragging him up onto his feet. Damen had a supporting arm around Laurent's waist immediately, even as he was still speaking, his voice low and dangerous but somehow comforting all at once. In his other hand, he held something that flashed in the limited light from the one candle, and he was dashing it at the bed as he spoke. Laurent squinted through the dark to see it and realized that it was water -- blessed, he supposed, by some church. When the drops landed in Laurent's bedsheets, they fizzed and steamed.

Slowly, Damen's chanting seemed to rock and slow until finally he stopped speaking. At the same time, he stopped sprinkling the water over the bed, and he released his hold on Laurent, who drew in a quiet but shaky breath and then stepped back.

"Is it gone?" he asked, and remarkably, he did not sound affected, despite the fact that his heart still raced and he could feel his blood running through him like ice.

"For now," Damen said. "It will take more than that to get rid of it for good, but I -- I just wanted to stop it."

Laurent nodded. He became aware of how his nightshirt had gone all disarrayed in the assault, open at the neck and rucked up around his thighs. He straightened it out in as dignified a way as he could. "Thank you," he said, "for stopping it."

Damen nodded. He looked as though there were more to say, and Laurent considered the merits of asking him to say it now, or taking advantage of the fact that the ghost of his uncle had been put off for a while, and trying to get a good night's sleep.

"I'll leave you to sleep," Damen said. His eyes were on Laurent's face, either pointedly ignoring the state of the rest of him or perhaps unwilling to look away. Confusion churned through Laurent, and as he did to varying degrees of every day, he wished Auguste was here with him, wished that he could talk to his brother, and share some of whatever he was feeling. Even if Auguste couldn't give him advice, it would have been nice to have him listen.

For some reason, the full meaning behind Damen's words didn't strike Laurent until he finally turned away and went back over to his chair to gather his things.

"You're leaving?" Laurent asked. To his credit, he didn't hear much of the fear he felt creeping into his voice, but it was there anyway, shivering beneath the surface, whether Damen heard it or not.

"It won't have the strength to manifest again tonight. You'll be safe, and I don't want to disturb you."

Laurent nodded -- what else could he do? -- and by the time Damen had his supplies bunched into his arms and made his way over to the bedroom door, Laurent had slipped back beneath the covers. He turned his face away from the door to face the window instead. He told himself he did this so Damen wouldn't get the wrong idea and think he didn't want him to leave, but really he did it so Damen wouldn't be able to see the flush to his cheeks, and it was far harder than he would ever admit not to turn to look at Damen as he hovered in the doorway before finally stepping out into the hall.

#

The next few nights progressed in much the same way. Sometimes Damen and Laurent would have spent some time together during the day, discussing plans of action or merely working in the same room. Damen still had business to attend to in Greece, which he managed via correspondence while he stayed at the manor. And of course, all of the de Vere family's business and holdings had transferred to Laurent when both his father and his brother had died, so he had work of his own.

Sometimes, though, when they both needed a break from the shadowy manor, they would take a meal together in the solarium, or walk outside together over the grounds. Damen told Laurent about Greece -- Laurent had not been able to go on his own Tour, as he would have if the fire had never happened, and so he had seen far less of the world than he would have liked. And Laurent told Damen stories about his family, about his kind-hearted if somewhat aloof parents, and about Auguste. Damen told Laurent stories of Auguste too, as he had known him, and it felt unapologetically good to speak to someone who had known Auguste in life.

He didn't know if it had happened when Damen saved him from the ghost of his uncle that first night, or if it had been before that, when Laurent had finally told Damen the truth of what was really going on here, but things between them had changed.

Laurent still enjoyed casting barbed words in Damen's direction -- he didn't think anything would ever sap the pleasure from that, especially when Damen was driving him crazy as he banged around the house -- and Damen certainly still seemed to enjoy antagonizing him. But there was a camaraderie between them that hadn't been there before.

And every night, after the servants had been dismissed for the evening, when it was time to sleep, Damen would knock softly at Laurent's bedroom door, and Laurent would let him in. 

Sometimes he was already undressed and ready for bed, but if he hadn't made it that far yet, Damen would help him with the buttons of his shirt, which always resulted in a prolonged moment of knife-sharp tension as they stood mere inches away from each other. And then, Damen would retreat to his chair by the window and Laurent would check to make sure that Auguste's knife still waited where he left it beneath the pillow, and Laurent would climb into bed while Damen kept watch.

And, every night, sometime after Laurent fell asleep, he would wake to the feel of cool fingers on him, stroking down his neck and chest, and he would be unable to move or speak, at the thing's mercy until Damen could see what was happening and pull Laurent free, again banishing the specter for the rest of the night.

The problem was that this seemed to be all they were able to do, and while it was true that the phantom touching didn't make it as far as it surely would have without Damen there to stop it, Laurent still had to endure it, with no knowledge of how long it would take Damen to see what was happening.

Even when he kept his attention firmly on Laurent from his place several feet away, the ghost of his uncle was as clever as the man himself, it seemed, and it was getting better at hiding its movements, knowing what was coming.

During the days, when Damen wasn't working on business, he dedicated nearly all of his time to trying to find a more permanent solution. Unfortunately, most of the books published on such subjects were utter nonsense, the work of charlatans looking to capitalize on the pain of others. Almost none of them dealt with real hauntings at all. So it was a lot of wasted time and frustration, even when Laurent set his own work aside to help look.

Finally, after nearly a week of this, Laurent snapped. "You're too far away," he said as they walked side-by-side over the rolling grass of the grounds in the afternoon.

He glanced over to see Damen looking at him, appearing somewhat scandalized, though Laurent couldn't tell whether this was because of his sudden outburst or the implication of the words he'd spoken.

"That is," he said, "perhaps if you were closer, you would be able to realize what was happening sooner. Maybe even stop it from happening altogether. Until we find a permanent solution, of course."

"Laurent," Damen said, and his voice was low and sweet and pitying.

Laurent looked into Damen's face and could see plain as day that the man did not know what he was attempting, delicately, to suggest. Damen thought Laurent was merely casting around in desperation for some idea that might save him from suffering his uncle's attentions. And he didn't have an answer, so he felt bad. He wanted to find some gentle way of telling Laurent that he didn't know what to do.

For a few short seconds, Laurent indulged himself in a long consideration of the deep blue sky overhead. He did not want to be looking at Damen's face when he said his next words.

"Damen," he said, interrupting Damen's pitying gazing. In his embarrassment, he sounded sharp and annoyed, and he leaned into it to get himself through what he had to say next. "I'm suggesting that -- if you," he paused, searching for the best possible way to phrase it, "if you were to be in the bed as well, then it might not happen at all."

He chanced a glance over at Damen, who was still walking beside him over the damp grass, but rather than watching his feet as he moved, he had turned to stare at Laurent with wide eyes. "If," he said, "you mean, in the bed -- with you?"

Laurent was almost tempted to laugh, and for a moment he was torn between embracing it and shoving it aside, but in deference to his pride, he went with the latter. "Yes, Damianos," he snapped. "With me. Unless that's such an abhorrent concept to you, in which case I suppose I'll just continue on as I've been doing, shall I?"

Damen looked properly chastened, and in the abundant light of the afternoon, Laurent could even see some color come into his cheeks.

The knowledge that Damen could visibly flush was new -- his skin was much darker than Laurent's own, and inside the manor, even the brightest noon was dark and dulled. Laurent tucked this piece of information aside for latter examination and use.

"I'm sorry," Damen said. "Of course it's worth trying. Tonight then?"

Laurent nodded, suddenly feeling that all of the scrap had gone out of him. He didn't know what to make of Damen's reaction to his suggestion. Neither did he know what to make of the fact that he had made the suggestion in the first place. He was being foolish and reckless and he knew it, and yet he couldn't seem to bring himself to take it all back.

"It isn't, by the way," Damen said. Some of his usual good humor had come back into his voice now, and when Laurent looked over at him, it was to find Damen already watching him.

"Isn't what?" Laurent asked.

Now Damen did look away, but he had the hint of a smile playing on his lips. "It isn't abhorrent," he said, "the thought of sharing the bed with you."

Laurent turned quickly away to make sure his own suddenly flushing face wasn't obvious, and neither of them spoke again for quite some time.


	3. Chapter 3

That night Laurent retired early to his chambers, mostly to get away from Damen. They had been spending nearly all of their time together since the first night Damen had spent in Laurent's room. Since Laurent had told him the truth about what was going on in the house.

So it would have been strange just to walk away without saying anything, but Laurent found it increasingly difficult to get any work done sitting in the library across a table from Damen when all he could think about was the reality that in a few short hours, they would be sharing the space of a single bed, their bodies held close under the covers together, warm and soft in the brown-black of the early summer night.

He couldn't think about it without stumbling and falling off track, and he couldn't seem to make himself stop thinking about it. So all that was left was to retire early and hope he could pull himself together before Damen joined him.

When he stood from the table, Damen had moved as though to do the same. "Should I --?" he began, but Laurent held up a hand to stop him.

"No," he said, perhaps a little too forcefully. "Take your time."

For a moment, they both stood there, hesitating, Laurent having just stood from his chair at the large table, and Damen half-standing from his.

Laurent still had his fingertips pressed to the open page of the book he had been reading, as though it could ground him, as though he needed it to ground him, or he would drift away. He looked down at the book, rather than continuing to look into Damen's unguarded face, which seemed to show a myriad of thoughts and feelings that changed and shifted almost as soon as Laurent could notice them -- nerves, surely, and uncertainty, and something that might have been anticipation, but Laurent did not allow himself to dwell on it long enough to know for sure. 

Finally, Damen nodded, almost more to himself than to Laurent, and he sank back down into his chair. This seemed to free Laurent, and he swept out of the library without a single glance back, afraid he would be caught by those free expressions in Damen's face if he allowed himself to consider them at all.

In his own rooms, the knowledge that Damen would soon be joining him there -- and not to sit separately by the window, watching out for any supernatural occurrences -- seemed to warm the whole place.

The candles that had been lit for him should have left the room feeling only just warm and pleasant enough to stand. The darkness should have been creeping in from the windows and the corners. Instead, it felt more welcoming than it had in nearly a year, and Laurent wondered how much it had to do with Damen himself, and how much was simply the fact of not being alone.

Laurent got himself undressed and tried not to miss the way it felt when Damen helped him.

In the immediate aftermath of the fire, he had hired Paschal, the now-retired doctor from the nearby town, who had been the de Vere family's preferred physician through Laurent's entire life, to move into the manor and help him tend his wounds, both physical and emotional.

It had been nice to have someone nearby who had known Laurent for years, who had seen him grow up, who knew exactly what he had lost when his family died together and left him behind. And he had been more than up to the task of treating Laurent's burns, helping him perform the tasks that were made more difficult by his healing hands, and working with him on exercises to help him get as much of his motion back as possible.

Probably Laurent didn't really need him here anymore, but he would keep Paschal on for as long as the man consented to stay. In any case, thanks to his help, Laurent's hands were in much better shape than they would have been otherwise. Fine movements were difficult and always would be, but he could certainly get himself in and out of his clothing by his own power, even if the small buttons sometimes proved frustrating.

But it had been nice, these past nights, having Damen here with him, his large but dexterous fingers freeing the buttons from their places, always taking care never to brush against Laurent's skin as he worked.

Laurent's body went warm as he thought about it. He remembered for about the fiftieth time that day what Damen had said earlier in the afternoon, as they'd walked together over the grounds. That it would not be unduly unpleasant to share the bed with Laurent. Of course, Damen was a kind man. He probably just meant that he would be glad to help Laurent further, if it could be done. If Laurent was right, and the presence of another person in the bed would mean that his uncle couldn't visit him.

With his clothing discarded, Laurent moved to the wardrobe to fetch a nightshirt, passing the mirror as he did so. He caught a glimpse of himself, the body his family had granted him through a combination of genetics, care, and hobbies. The fine, pale coloring that came from his mother's side of the family, the hair she had taught him to take care of, the musculature he had gained through years of riding and dueling with Auguste.

But it was not the image of himself that made him linger there for a long moment. Laurent's physical sense of himself was something that existed outside, something he only engaged with in perfunctory ways. It hardly felt like a true part of him, and so he never paid it much mind.

But as he stood there, he could have sworn he'd seen something -- move? change? shift? -- in the mirror. He stared into it, not at all sure if he would prefer to see it again or not at all. He wished Damen were here now, clothes or no clothes, because then at least he wouldn't be alone.

He should have known better than to rely on that. He had been alone since his parents and his brother died.

And then he saw it again, a ripple in the mirror, as though the surface of it were water, the surface of a puddle rather than solid glass. He stared into it, and for a long moment, he thought the ripple might resolve into something, some defined image, perhaps even a face. But then, that was ridiculous. There was already a face looking at him from out of the mirror. His own. That was how mirrors worked after all. And yet --

He blinked, and the mirror at once resolved itself into its usual shape. No ripples, no disturbance, only Laurent himself staring back out of it. He tried not to have the sense that the reflection was separate from him somehow, as though, when he turned away from it, it would continue watching him.

There was no way to quantify something like that -- not while he was alone anyway -- and so there was no point worrying over it.

He turned away, went to the wardrobe, and threw a nightshirt over himself, taking special care to move efficiently, without hurrying. He would have felt even more ridiculous than he already did if he were to go rushing around his own bedroom just to get under the relative safety of the blankets.

Besides, the bed was hardly the safest place in here, was it?

Laurent went around the room, carefully extinguishing most of the candles, though he left a few for Damen to see by. His last thought as he finally slipped beneath the bedclothes was that he hoped Damen wouldn't wait too long before joining him, and this time the anxiety that tinged the thought did not come only from the idea of sharing the bed with him. He remained uncomfortably aware of the mirror on the other side of the room right up until he finally began to doze off.

#

He woke a short time later to the feeling of pressure on the bed beside him, and thinking of the past few months' torment, his immediate response was to thrash, to fight, to lash out and try to get away.

But his hands met solid body, and then he remembered that he shouldn't be able to move at all.

"Laurent," a whispered voice said, and then Laurent remembered: Damen.

Damen had come into the room and blown out the rest of the candles. He had not yet begun to get into the bed, Laurent could see as he squinted through the dim light filtering in from the moon outside. He had merely come to the bed and leaned over it, one hand pressed into the mattress. He had meant to wake Laurent gently, so he wouldn't be frightened.

Although this hadn't worked out exactly as planned, the obvious intent of it helped to soften Laurent's terror quickly. "Damen," he said, choking on the name and sounding somewhat pathetic to his own ears, but from what he could see of Damen's face in the dark, he was regarding Laurent with caution, but it didn't seem as though he felt insulted, or unduly piteous, about Laurent's reaction.

"I'm sorry," Damen said, keeping his voice low and soothing, "I didn't mean to surprise you."

Laurent shook his head, more to clear it than anything else, and moved over in the bed, making room. He had managed to get himself back under enough control that he didn't think he looked terrified anymore, but his heart still pounded beneath his ribs to the point that, if Damen got too close, Laurent feared he would be able to feel it.

But Damen hesitated, still leaning down over the bed but making no move to climb into it. "Are you sure?" he asked.

In answer to this, something in Laurent's chest, something that felt soft and tender and underused, gave a twinge, and in defense against it, he laid on his most sardonic tone and said, "Do you need me to draw you a map?"

With this, he flipped back the outer layers of the bedding, as open an invitation as he could bring himself to give, and finally Damen laughed a little, hardly more than an exhalation, set one heavy knee onto the mattress, and then slid into the bed.

Laurent had to make sure that he continued breathing. If Damen's help with the buttons of his shirts had affected him, he could only imagine what sharing the minimal space beneath heavy blankets together was going to do to him. Maybe he was making a mistake. Maybe the second-biggest mistake of his life, after deciding to stay outside to read on the day of the fire.

But with thoughts of the fire came thoughts of his uncle, and everything he had been through since that day. If there was any chance -- even a small one -- that Damen's presence here in his bed would mean no spectral visits from his uncle tonight, then it would be worth it, no matter how his heart strained to beat right out of his chest.

Damen's considerable bulk meant that there could only be a few inches between them, but Damen took care to maintain them meticulously. For the first few minutes, neither of them spoke or moved. Damen lay on his side, presumably to give Laurent more space, though it may have been just to be disconcerting, it was hard to tell with Damen.

He had both a knack and a penchant for pushing Laurent's buttons, and yet at the same time, he never seemed to want to overstep his bounds. He wanted to push, but didn't want to cross any lines.

When it wasn't driving Laurent crazy, he appreciated this about Damen. It made him feel more normal. Like his problems were those that anyone might face. Now, though, Laurent wished Damen would push harder. They were in a bed, together, and Laurent didn't know what to do, or what Damen wanted him to do, and he felt very young suddenly, and he hated to feel young.

"Are you all right?" Damen said. "Is this okay?"

"It's fine," Laurent bit out, still sounding almost angry in his desperation not to melt into a puddle right here and now.

Damen nodded, taking Laurent at his word, which at least allowed Laurent to relax somewhat. "Just try to get some sleep," he said. "Hopefully nothing will happen tonight, but wake me if you need to."

Laurent swallowed and found that he didn't know what to say to this. Maybe he didn't need to say anything. He nodded to show that he understood, and then, deliberately, he closed his eyes.

It took some time to fall asleep, knowing that Damen was right beside him. If Laurent were to roll in his sleep, he would be practically on top of him. If Damen flung out an arm in the night, he would be draped across Laurent's chest. And while Laurent found these ideas -- compelling -- his body seemed ready to run away with them entirely. Fortunately he kept himself calm enough that he didn't think it would be noticeable, but still, his heart beat fast and hard, and he could feel his blood hot and racing through him.

He didn't even know what he  _ wanted _ , really, didn't even know what there was to want, perhaps, but his body certainly seemed to want something, and it was all he could do to keep it still and pressed as far to his own side of the bed as possible.

Eventually, he could tell that Damen had fallen asleep. His breathing deepened, and his limbs were less rigidly kept to his own side of the mattress, though even as he loosened somewhat, he still didn't touch Laurent. Knowing that Damen himself was asleep, and with the hope that Damen being beside him in the bed would keep his uncle away, Laurent finally calmed down enough to drift off as well.

The next thing he knew, he was waking up in the morning. The windows let in so much bright, cheerful sunlight that he knew he must have slept far later than usual. Beside him, the bed was empty. He knew it even before he turned to look, because he could sense that the weight which had been next to him through the night had lifted.

Slowly, he came to understand what this meant: that not only had his uncle not visited him the previous night, but in addition, he had slept better than he had in months. Not only had he slept through the night, but he'd gone on sleeping well into the morning, as though to rest and relax his body were the easiest thing in the world -- something that had never been true, even before the fire. Was all of that due to Damen? He didn't see what else it could be.

Laurent crawled out of bed and washed up with the basin of water Jord must have left at some point in the morning. The water had cooled to the point of being almost unpleasant, which seemed to suggest that Laurent had slept even later than he'd thought. Despite this, he couldn't help the rolling pleasure that swept through him as he moved. He couldn't remember the last time he had felt so well-rested. 

He got dressed quickly and went downstairs, to find Damen and to get to the day's work. He didn't know why he felt in such a rush to find Damen. It was as though he worried he would be gone, like he had solved this problem, served his purpose, and disappeared. But Damen was sitting in the solarium over a simple breakfast, a few papers spread out in front of him. He looked up when Laurent stepped into the room, and when he saw who it was, he smiled an open, charming smile that looked as though it cost him nothing to express.

At the sight of him, Laurent's own easy sense of himself drained suddenly away, and he felt uncomfortably self-aware. Suddenly he wondered whether he had done anything embarrassing in his sleep.

But he pushed all of this aside, greeted Damen cordially, and joined him at the table for breakfast. Damen seemed to understand that Laurent needed some time to gather himself, and he didn't push for conversation. The two of them simply sat close by each other, aware of their success of the previous night, working quietly on their own affairs.

And that was how it went for the next several days and nights. The primary difference was that Damen no longer allowed Laurent to go to his room alone, lest he frighten him all over again.

Instead, as soon as Laurent moved to retire for the night, Damen packed up whatever he was working on and followed him up to the room. They would each get ready for bed quietly, on separate sides of the room, faced away from each other -- except for when Damen helped with Laurent's buttons, which he did nearly every night now.

And then, once they were ready, they would climb into the bed side-by-side.

Damen was always careful to hold himself tightly in his own space. He never so much as brushed Laurent's shoulder, even in his sleep. Laurent wasn't entirely sure what to make of his own body's apparent desire to reach out to him, but he ignored it. If Damen was interested in anything like that, surely he would have done something about it by now. Ergo, he was not interested; he was merely doing this to help Laurent.

So they fell into a pattern that was, if not quite comfortable, then at least reliable. Laurent continued to sleep better than he had in perhaps his entire life, and there were no more visits from his uncle, as long as Damen slept in the bed beside him.

In the first days of their new routine, they were somewhat awkward around each other, to the point that the few servants who remained in the house began to believe they'd had some sort of row. They were always careful not to be too obvious that they were retiring to the same room at night, and so none of the others knew they'd been sharing a bed over the last week.

Before long, though, it simply became commonplace, or at least usual enough that they were able to relax around each other during the days again. Apparently accepting that they had made up from whatever fight they'd been having, Jord and the other servants didn't say anything about the change back to relative peace and comfort, and in fact, as they days passed and Damen became a firmer and firmer staple in the house, Laurent came to realize that the servants rather liked him.

He would sometimes see Damen and Jord talking in the hall, laughing and joking together as though they were old friends. Damen would engage Paschal in what appeared to be deep conversations about who knew what, and Laurent often caught Vannes eyeing Damen somewhat covetously when she thought no one was looking, though whether this was because she desired the man himself or because she thought he might be useful to her somehow, it was impossible to tell with Vannes.

In any case the days passed, and Laurent believed that he had finally become accustomed to sharing the bed with Damen -- so, naturally, that was the moment when Damen threw a wrench into all of it.

Laurent supposed it served him right, really. He should never have allowed himself to grow so complacent. He could hardly keep Damen here at the manor forever. Sharing the bed had only ever been intended as a temporary solution while they worked on finding something more permanent, something that would get rid of Laurent's uncle (and anyone else who might be hanging around) for good.

But he had become too comfortable with the arrangement, and he'd allowed himself to stop looking for something else, instead focusing on his family's business and leaving Damen to his own devices during the day. He should have known that Damen would realize this and call him out on it eventually. Which was exactly what he did, after he and Laurent had been sharing the bed in Laurent's room for over a week.

"Laurent," he said that night as he followed Laurent into the room. He kept his voice low, ostensibly to make sure it didn't carry through the empty house before he'd shut the door behind him, but whatever his intent, the effect was a warmth that pooled low in Laurent's belly.

Laurent turned to face him, arching an eyebrow. He removed his jacket, and his hands went to his buttons automatically, though he didn't really expect to take care of them himself anymore.

Sure enough, Damen crossed the room, closing up the space between them at once, and then his hands were on Laurent's shirt, hovering right there near his throat, and Laurent had to swallow against a rising tide of -- something. Emotion, thought, fear. Damen had come into the room with something to say, and he had yet to say it, but Laurent thought he might know what it was regarding.

"I think I might have found something," Damen said.

Laurent felt his heart sink somewhat, but he didn't want to give the sensation any more of his attention than it deserved, which was none, so he ignored it. "Oh?" he said, inviting Damen to explain without over-committing his voice.

"It's an old sort of ritual," Damen said. "I'm not sure it will work, but it can't hurt to try."

"It doesn't require any," Laurent looked up from where he had been watching Damen's hands work to instead meet his eyes, "human sacrifice?"

Damen smiled -- not the hearty, amused-at-your-expense grin he typically threw around, but instead a soft, sweet smile that seemed an entirely private thing. Laurent's chest gave a feeble pang. "No," he said, "no human sacrifice required."

Laurent nodded, aware of how warm the air between them had grown, turning his breathing shallow. He dropped his eyes back down to Damen's fingers, which had just finished unfastening the last of the buttons on Laurent's shirt. Still, his hands remained, clinging to the edges of the fabric gently. Laurent stepped out of their reach.

Almost seeming as though he hadn't meant to do it at all, Damen immediately reached out to him, managing to just catch Laurent's hand. Laurent flinched, realizing that Damen's fingers were pressed to the scarring on his palm.

Laurent didn't feel especially self-conscious of the scarring. If anything, he felt self-conscious of the fact that he had escaped the fire with nothing more than wounded hands, when none of his family, and many of the staff in the house, had made it out at all.

The scars themselves were, then, something he bore not with pride, but with willing acceptance. They reminded him that he lived not only for himself, but for all of them. And he could not be ashamed of that.

All of that aside, however, they were a part of his body he did not yet fully understand. They were new to him, still, and he had not fully processed their place as a part of him. So when Damen's warm fingers brushed over them, Laurent didn't know how to react. It felt private and vulnerable in a way no other part of him truly did.

He realized that he was staring down at the place where his hand touched Damen's. They were not holding hands exactly, as it was more that Damen's fingertips were pressed into Laurent's palm at an angle, stopping him from stepping further away. But there was an intimacy to the gesture, perhaps made even stronger by the fact that it had been such a thoughtless movement that had landed them here.

Laurent looked up at Damen again, only to find him already looking at Laurent. His brow was furrowed, his eyes slightly narrowed as he regarded Laurent. And Laurent could feel that his own eyes were wide and guileless, and he did his best to rearrange his face into cool, blank expectation. Waiting for an answer. Waiting for Damen to say or do whatever he'd needed to stop Laurent for.

But Damen didn't speak or move for a long moment. Instead, he simply held them both there, still and waiting for something only he could have answered, though he seemed unconcerned with doing so.

Finally, slowly, he adjusted his grip on Laurent's hand, gently turning it so that the palm faced up. He took a step closer, so that he was almost as close as he had been to take care of Laurent's buttons. He had stopped looking at Laurent's face to instead look down at the scarring spread over the entirety of his palm, the undersides of all of his fingers.

He had examined the scarring once before, shortly after he'd arrived at the manor. But it had been perfunctory then, a necessary step in his investigation. It was anything but perfunctory now.

He gently spread Laurent's fingers, trailing the tips of his own perfect fingers up the undersides of them, following the mottled flesh. The nerves there had been damaged almost to the point that Laurent couldn't feel it, except in the slightest exertion of pressure. But Damen didn't seem to be watching Laurent's face for a reaction. He seemed fascinated by the patterns of the scars, or at least fixated on them. He brushed the pad of his thumb over the center of Laurent's palm, and the vulnerability of it stopped Laurent's breath in his chest for a moment or two.

And then, before Laurent realized what Damen was going to do, he lifted Laurent's hand and pressed the softest kiss to the center of the palm.

Laurent startled violently, not at the feel of it, but rather at the sight. Damen looked up at him with his head still bent over his hand, his eyelashes long and hiding the warm pools of his brown eyes in deep black shadow.

This sudden movement seemed to release Damen from the spell he had been under, and he dropped Laurent's hand. "I apologize," he said, the slightest edge of desperation in his voice, as though he was shocked with himself and couldn't believe what he'd just done. "I didn't mean to overstep." He drew in a breath, which -- unless Laurent was mistaken, and he was shaken enough that he might have been -- seemed to stutter. "If you would like for me to sleep in my own room, I understand. We should be able to attempt the ritual tomorrow."

Laurent blinked, Damen's words repeating themselves in his head as he tried to process both what they meant, and the kiss to his palm, at the same time. "No," he managed after a moment, thinking still of that sweet kiss, and thinking also of his uncle. "No, you can stay."

Damen nodded slowly, perhaps unsure what to make of this. But he didn't say anything about it. Instead, he turned away to get himself ready for bed, not out of any modesty of his own, Laurent didn't think, but more out of deference to Laurent.

And Laurent appreciated the moment of relative privacy now more than ever. As soon as Damen had touched his hand, his body had begun to heat up, and with the surprising but not at all unpleasant press of lips to the center of his palm had come a rush of feeling all through him, racing from the point of contact, up his arm, down into his chest, and throughout the rest of his body from there. He was not in what he would call a compromising situation, but it was a near thing. And he knew that one glimpse of Damen's bare, broad shoulders, his beautifully sculpted back, would be enough to send Laurent hurtling in that direction.

So he kept his own back turned on Damen as he finished getting himself ready for bed, and Damen didn't turn back around until he'd heard the bedclothes rustling as Laurent crawled beneath them.

Then Damen went around the room, extinguishing the candles that Vannes had lit after banking the fire, and made his way over to the bed as well.

"Are you sure --" he began, but Laurent cut him off.

"Yes," he said, his voice sounding more certain than he truly felt. Not because he didn't trust Damen to lie respectfully beside him in the bed, but because he didn't trust himself. He didn't say this, of course, and Damen took him at his word, probably assuming that whatever he had done, even if Laurent had believed him to have crossed a line, it was still better than whatever might happen if Damen were to sleep elsewhere.

Which was true, but it was far from the only reason Laurent wanted Damen to stay.

That night, it was as difficult to fall asleep as it had been the first time they had shared the bed. Laurent was aware of Damen so close to him as much as he had been on that first night, aware of every point where his heavy body pressed down into the mattress. What was new was that he felt more aware of himself this time too. He could not erase from his mind all of the places where his body lay close enough to Damen's that he could have barely moved and touched him.

He felt like lightning beneath the blankets, hot and bright and sparking in a way that didn't seem to have anything to do with the actual temperature of his body. If he were to throw the blankets off, somehow he knew that the feeling would remain. And then he would have questions to answer. So he remained still, trying to regulate his breathing so that it wasn't obvious that he was lying awake. He thought Damen must be asleep by now, but still, he didn't dare move or make any sound.

In his mind, he replayed everything about the scene from earlier again and again: the slight pressure of Damen's fingers running over his own; Damen's head bowed over his wounded hand; the kiss to the center of his palm where Damen's lips parted over the scarring as though it didn't bother him at all; the way his eyes had appeared as warm, welcoming pools of shadow when he'd looked up at Laurent's face.

For the first time, Laurent almost wished he had told Damen to go away, because he was afraid he would betray himself if Damen stayed here, and because if he'd had the bed to himself, he could have done something to alleviate the warmth that had spread quickly through him and seemed loathe to drain away on its own. Only as soon as he had this thought, he remembered his uncle, the touch of cool, invisible fingers over and across his entire body, and the desire to follow those paths with his own hands quickly fled, as it had nearly every time the thought had occurred to him over the past months.

"Laurent," Damen said, whispering into the dark of the room. "Are you awake?"

Despite everything that had just been running through his mind, Laurent couldn't help but to huff out a laugh. Beside him, Damen turned onto his side to face him, though they could hardly see each other in the dark. Something about this struck Laurent as innocent and strangely charming. He turned onto his own side, mimicking the adjustment to face Damen. They propped themselves up on their elbows, lifting just slightly above the pillows.

Outside, a nearly-full moon had risen over the rolling fields. Since the fire, Laurent preferred not to sleep in total darkness, and so he had stopped drawing all of the curtains over the windows. It helped him in other areas of his life as well, as he'd always preferred to wake with the sun.

As such, he could see Damen in the light of the moon as it came in through the window. It had an interesting effect on his golden-brown skin, so that he didn't so much seem to glow in the light as he almost seemed to change in quality from the image of light itself to a warm sort of shadow. In the dark, he was perhaps intimidating in form, but everything about him spoke of comfort and safety. He was the warmth of a hearth after a fire had been banked, the shadow in the corner of a familiar room, the welcoming dark when you closed your eyes in a safe place.

Laurent wanted very badly to reach out to him, to touch his face, to brush his fingers through his curls. But he didn't. Instead he whispered, "What do we have to do, for the ritual?"

Damen shrugged the shoulder he was not currently leaning on. "Light a few candles, chant a few words. We'll need some things that belonged to your uncle -- and," but before he could say any more, Laurent cut him off.

"That won't be a problem," he said, as though unaware that Damen had meant to say more. "Do you think it will work?"

"If the book is legitimate, there's no reason why it shouldn't. I'm not sure how much I trust the author though."

The white-blue light of the moon caught in Damen's hair and his eyes, like tiny shards of ice. Laurent wondered what he himself looked like. Did the moonlight halo out behind him, around him, shining in his cool blond hair? Did Damen notice, and if so, what did he think of it? It was usually so hard to remind himself that he occupied a body at all. And yet, pressed into the bed with Damen, even when they weren't touching, it was impossible to forget.

He raised his eyes from where they had been hovering on Damen's bare shoulder to instead look into his eyes. "Why did you do that?" he said. "Earlier?"

Damen swallowed; Laurent watched the movement of his throat. He hoped he knew why Damen had done it, and yet he could hardly bring himself to hope that it was the truth. What would it mean if it was? What did he want it to mean?

Perhaps similar thoughts were racing through Damen's mind. He took a long moment to himself before he answered, and when he did finally open his mouth, it occurred to Laurent that he might be planning to apologize again, that he might have taken Laurent's question as an accusation. When he spoke, though, it wasn't to apologize.

He said, "I felt -- compelled."

" _ Compelled _ ?" Laurent said, shocked and horrified as his mind suddenly flooded with all of the things that this could mean. Had he thought Laurent wanted him to do it? The idea that he might have perceived himself pressured to do something, by Laurent, that he hadn't wanted was horrible in ways Laurent was all too familiar with, and for the second time that night, he remembered the feeling of ghost fingers trailing over him. Or -- perhaps worse -- did he mean that it had been the ghost that had done it? Some supernatural power that had overtaken him?

"No! No," Damen quickly amended. "Not compelled as in -- nothing outside myself."

Laurent, his eyes still wide with the immediate horror he had felt, nodded slowly. "So, then, something inside you." He meant it as a question, but it didn't sound that way.

"I suppose," Damen said. "I," and then he paused to draw in a deep breath. "I feel drawn to you. Not because of anything you've done, or because of anything else, I just. I like you," he finished.

And now Laurent felt his lip twist into the slow beginning of a smile. "You like me," he repeated. He still didn't understand exactly what Damen meant, but it seemed only fair that the next one of them to climb out onto a limb ought to be him, as Damen had risked himself twice already in one evening.

With Damen's eyes still trained carefully on his face, Laurent reached out slowly, finally allowing his fingers to touch the curls of Damen's hair that had fallen down into his face, pushing them gently back. He moved carefully, deliberately, and slowly enough that Damen could smack his hand away if he wanted to, or pull back.

But he didn't push Laurent away, and he didn't press himself back on the bed to escape him. His eyes remained fixed on Laurent's face, on his eyes, as Laurent brushed the hair away. And then, when Laurent made to pull his hand back to himself, for the second time that night, Damen caught it, by the wrist this time, stopping him.

Without taking his eyes from Laurent's, he drew his wrist to his mouth. He hovered there for a moment without moving any more, giving Laurent time to pull away. But Laurent did not do this any more than Damen had moved back from his fingers in his hair. And then, just as deliberately, Damen lifted Laurent's wrist to his mouth and pressed a hot, open-mouthed kiss right over the vein there.

This time, Laurent was more prepared, and he didn't startle as he had before, though he did feel his pulse immediately pick up in answer to the light touch of Damen's lips over the sensitive, delicate skin. As though he could feel the sudden uptick in his heart rate, Damen's eyes slipped shut, and touched just the very tip of his tongue to Laurent's wrist, a sensation that was jarring and sweet and thrilling all at once. Laurent was pretty sure he stopped breathing entirely for several long seconds after that, stilled beneath the touch of Damen's tongue, transfixed by the sight of it, wet and shining in the light from the moon.

He didn't realize his own lips had parted until Damen released his wrist and opened his eyes. They seemed somehow heavier now, after the weight of what he had just done. Everything until this moment could have been ignored, brushed off as innocent, if they had decided they wanted it to be. But this was just one step too far for turning back from, and they both knew it.

But Laurent didn't want to turn back. And based on the heat in Damen's gaze, the way his eyes now moved from Laurent's own eyes down to his lips, he didn't think Damen did either.

"Damen," he said, hoping it sounded not like a warning, but an invitation. He moved his freed hand to Damen's shoulder, warm to the touch even through the scarred flesh of his hand.

Before Laurent could say anything else, Damen leaned forward, emphatically breaching the line of space that separated them from each other. As soon as he had done this, however, he paused, again allowing Laurent the time to pull away if he wanted to. And, because Laurent didn't want to, they remained there, no more than three inches of space between them now, for a long moment.

And then, very slowly, Damen leaned closer, and then closer, until eventually Laurent had to allow his eyes to slip closed just so he wouldn't be utterly overwhelmed by Damen's proximity. Finally, Damen's lips touched his, still parted as though they had been waiting for exactly this, even though Laurent had carefully not allowed himself to imagine any such thing happening.

The kiss was simple and chaste, a light touch to mirror that which Damen had pressed first to his palm, and then to his wrist. A continuation of a thought, a culmination of a specific desire.

Laurent's breath stuttered and stalled as his entire body seemed to seize and then surge forward to meet the kiss with an enthusiasm that would have been embarrassing if it wasn't obvious, by the way Damen gasped into it, that Damen liked it.

Damen raised one hand to brush at the soft hair over Laurent's temple, and then down over the side of his face, until finally it came to rest against his neck, which was warm and damp with the heat of excitement. They held each other there, still and silent, for a moment, and then Damen's lips parted and Laurent felt the gentle touch of his tongue, a question to which Laurent's body seemed to know the answer. He met Damen's tongue with his own, and his whole body lit up.

Anything might have happened then. His face felt hot. All of him, in fact, was burning up, and beneath the blankets, he had grown hard so quickly that he felt light-headed. He had never been kissed, never been touched like this before in his life. It was stunning, overwhelming, and he would have followed Damen down any path he might have chosen, purely to chase the feeling.

Unfortunately for him, he didn't get the chance, because at that very moment, on the other side of the room, the mirror on the wall cracked and shattered with a rending crash.


	4. Chapter 4

Instantly, Damen and Laurent were both out of the bed, standing on opposite sides of it, both of them staring across the room at the shattered mirror. It had broken in large pieces, several of which had fallen to the floor, others of which were still clinging to the frame of the mirror. It did not look as though it had been struck. There was no central point from which the fissures had sprung, no smaller fractures that resulted in little shards. It had obviously been broken through supernatural means.

"Your uncle?" Damen said, keeping his voice low as though they could stop a ghost from overhearing their conversation if they measured their volume properly.

"Maybe," Laurent said. It was, of course, most likely his uncle, though he had another theory that might have carried water. He moved slowly forward over the floorboards.

"Be careful," Damen said. "Your feet."

Laurent looked down at his bare feet and moved more carefully over the floor as he made his way over to the mirror. He knelt to examine the shards on the floor, but he could tell nothing more from being closer to them. 

Whatever had done this, it was a more physical manifestation than any Laurent had seen, with the possible exception of the spectral touches he was subjected to whenever Damen didn't share his bed. But it had to have been because of the kiss. Either it had been his uncle, angry that he had been denied, angry that someone else had been granted what he had worked so hard to take. Or it was -- something else. But it had to have been in response to the kiss, or why else would it have happened now?

"Laurent," Damen said. "We can clean it up in the morning, when we can see better. There's nothing else we can do about it now."

"You don't think something else might happen?" Laurent asked, looking back over his shoulder at Damen, who was still standing, tensed, beside the bed.

"Not tonight," Damen said. "It takes a lot of energy to make a physical manifestation like that." He hesitated, and then he said, "Maybe I should go to my own room for the rest of the night."

Laurent understood. If the mirror had been broken by his uncle, and Damen was right about him not being able to do anything else tonight, then their excuse for sharing the bed was as shattered as the glass. But Laurent didn't want Damen to go, and in addition, he wasn't sure the mirror had been broken by his uncle. And if it hadn't been, then if Damen left, Laurent knew exactly what would happen the moment he fell asleep.

He shook his head. "You can go if you want to," he said, standing up again, considering the fact that maybe Damen had changed his mind, maybe he had gotten carried away in the moment and regretted kissing Laurent. "But I would prefer for you to stay."

Damen didn't answer right away, and they regarded each other from several steps apart for a long moment. Eventually, though, Damen nodded. "All right," he said. "But maybe it would be best if we --"

"Yes," Laurent agreed, in part because of the mirror, and in part because he had surprised himself, with how willing and eager he had been beneath the slight pressure of Damen's mouth on his. He was as frightened by that as he was by the broken mirror.

And so, they each climbed back into bed, sticking once more to their own sides of the mattress, carefully holding their bodies so that they didn't so much as brush each other with an idle hand. This time, Laurent fell asleep almost at once.

#

In the morning, Laurent woke warm, almost bordering on the edge of too warm, but so perfectly content that he didn't immediately move. He remembered nothing of the night before, for several long, easy moments. And then, as his mind steadily came back to him from the fog of sleep, he remembered first the shattered mirror, and then the kiss that had, presumably, caused it.

Finally, he realized that the reason he felt so warm was that sometime during the night, Damen had moved closer to him, and now was sleeping with one heavy arm draped over Laurent's body, curled protectively around his chest.

This realization did not destroy the peace Laurent felt, but it was as though a part of him branched off, so that he felt both anxious and content at the same time.

What did this mean, that Damen had pulled him to his chest overnight? He carefully looked back over his shoulder and saw in an instant that Damen was still peacefully asleep. Perhaps it didn't mean anything then, perhaps it had been merely an instinctive reaction to their proximity in the bed.

Of course, they had been sharing the bed for a week now, and it had never happened before. Laurent wanted to bury his face into his pillow, partly from embarrassment, partly from pleasure. It felt immeasurably good to be held like this. He hadn't felt so safe since well before the fire. In fact, he didn't know if he'd ever felt this safe, except perhaps when he'd been very young, and he'd known that his brother would always be there to protect him.

With the thought of his brother came renewed wonderings about the mirror the night before. He had for some time suspected that his uncle was not the only one haunting him, if haunting could be what it was called. Not that he expected anything malicious of Auguste.

But someone seemed to be protecting him from the worst of what his uncle could do to him, even before Damen had arrived. Had Auguste broken the mirror as more of the same? Did he think Laurent needed to be protected from Damen?

And if so, could he be right?

Very carefully, Laurent turned beneath Damen's arm, trying not to move too much so that he wouldn't wake Damen as he did so. He managed to roll onto his other side so that he was face-to-face with Damen as he had been the night before, only a few inches from him.

In sleep, he was perfect, his beautiful face entirely at peace. In the sunlight, he appeared utterly in his element. It turned his skin to burnished gold, brought out all of the color and shadow of his lovely curls, caught in his eyelashes so they glinted as though sparkling. He looked unreal, as though he had been literally crafted by the gods and sent here specifically for Laurent. Perhaps he was dangerous, but if he was, it was only the danger of overriding all of Laurent's defenses.

He had come to know Damen closely over the weeks since his arrival at the manor, and Laurent had no reason to suspect him of any kind of cruelty. In fact, he didn't know if he'd ever met a gentler soul, good-natured teasing aside.

And since he knew Auguste did not have any problem with the fact that Damen was a man, he had no reason to think that his brother objected on those grounds. So how could he find a way to communicate this to him, if indeed it had been Auguste who was responsible for the mirror in the first place?

For the first time, Laurent considered the idea that there were other ghosts haunting these halls. His mother, perhaps? His father? He shivered. He loved and missed his parents, but the thought of them following him invisibly through his days was not at all a pleasant one.

Finally, Damen stirred and seemed to begin the slow process of gently waking. Laurent didn't bother turning away from him. He wanted to see how Damen reacted to seeing him, whether there was any sign in his face that he regretted what had happened the night before. Or if he had been wrong about Damen, and he responded in some way that pointed to more nefarious motives.

But when Damen's eyes eventually fluttered open and landed on Laurent's face, he broke immediately into an open and easy smile, and it was impossible to imagine him ever taking any action that would hurt anyone, let alone Laurent, for whom he had shown only the tenderest care, no matter what Laurent had thrown at him. Laurent couldn't help the answering smile that spread over his own face, but he turned away to hide it in the pillow, feeling well beyond ridiculous.

Damen didn't let him hide though. He touched one finger beneath Laurent's chin and used it to gently lift his face again. Once he had Laurent where he wanted him, he only looked into his eyes for a long moment, as though he could see through them and into the tangled mess of thoughts beyond.

"Good morning," he said, his voice low and warm with sleep. 

Something seemed to flutter and thrill at the sound of it, somewhere in Laurent's belly, and he would have moved to hide his face again if he'd thought he could get away with it. Instead, he said, "Good morning," and tried not to give anything away in his voice or in his face.

"Laurent," Damen said, serious and heavy as he had ever been, "what happened last night -- not the mirror, but the rest of it."

Laurent swallowed and nodded, gearing up to listen to Damen telling him that it had been a mistake, that it couldn't happen again.

"Was that -- that is, have you ever...?" he trailed off, and Laurent felt color flood into his face immediately. Evidently that was answer enough, because Damen nodded his understanding as though Laurent had spoken his response aloud. "I thought so."

This made Laurent go immediately indignant and he felt himself cool, which at least had the added benefit of removing the flush from his cheeks. "You needn't do it again if it was so unpleasant," he said, sounding snippy even to his own ears.

But Damen merely laughed a little and shook his head. "I didn't say it was unpleasant. I only think I might have a bit more -- experience than you. In such matters."

Laurent's eyes widened and he nodded vaguely.

"Do you know," Damen said, "how things are done, between men?"

"I--" Laurent began, his voice catching, unsure exactly how to answer. Of course, he did. Laurent had always been a lover of knowledge, and he was good at finding out what he wanted to know, through various means. But was there more that he didn’t know? The truth was, he had no experience at all, and one could only learn so much through books and conversation. He settled on, "I have some idea."

Damen nodded to himself, as though confirming that this was, at least, enough to get along with. "Have you ever been with a woman?" he asked, apparently emboldened.

"No," Laurent said, carefully making sure to keep his eyes on Damen's face, not wanting to miss a single reaction, not wanting to give Damen the impression that he couldn't face this conversation head-on.

"I see," Damen said. For a moment, he seemed to think through something. Laurent understood the importance of stillness and quiet when he needed to think, to come to some sort of decision. And that was exactly what Damen seemed to be doing. Then, after a drawn-out moment, he came to his decision, and he spoke. "Laurent," he said.

Laurent braced himself for the worst, and prepared himself to respect Damen's decision, even if it was to leave the house and never see Laurent again.

"We don't have to do anything you don't want to do," Damen said. "We don't have to do anything at all, and I won't hold it against you for a moment. Nothing you don't want."

"And," Laurent said, "if I do want it?"

Damen smiled, a gentler version of the private smile that overtook him when he was amused despite himself, or at Laurent's expense. "Then I would be happy to show you the way," he said.

Laurent nodded, and for a long moment, neither of them spoke any more. They only looked at each other, gazes never straying from each other's eyes. In Laurent's mind, he ran through everything he knew about Damen, but he kept coming to the same answer again and again: he felt safe here, with Damen. He couldn't imagine a scenario in which Damen would willingly hurt him, or cause him any kind of confusion or pain.

Maybe he didn't know Damen as well as he should, but he knew that he had dropped everything in his life to come here to help Laurent, when he had never even met him; he knew he'd taken Laurent's moods and his barbed tongue without complaint; he knew he'd worked hard every day just to help Laurent with his problems; he knew he'd been willing to sleep chastely in Laurent's bed beside him to keep away his uncle and the torments he brought. He knew he had been nothing but ceaselessly gentle and kind since the moment he'd arrived on Laurent's doorstep. And he knew that Auguste had cared about and trusted him, enough to keep up a correspondence with him for years after their brief meeting.

That was enough for Laurent. "All right," he said, his voice barely above a whisper.

"All right?" Damen repeated. He wasn't teasing, merely making sure he understood Laurent's meaning before making any assumptions.

"Show me," Laurent said.

This time when Damen grinned, it was the big, joyful smile that came over him when he was full to the brim with easy, bubbling happiness. Laurent had only seen it a handful of times, usually when they were out on the grounds, when they talked about Auguste or swordplay, or when he demonstrated for Laurent the traditional wrestling moves of his country. But he shone the full strength of it on Laurent now, and Laurent couldn't help the answering smile on his own face, though through force of habit, he tamped it down as much as he could.

Damen leaned in close to him then, and this time when he paused a mere breath away, Laurent had the distinct impression that he did it to tease. Perhaps he thought Laurent would be too self-conscious to close the space between them himself, but if so, he had more to learn about Laurent than he knew.

Laurent nudged forward and pressed his mouth to Damen's, just as slowly and softly as Damen had done the night before. It was not caution -- the bright light of the morning made it hard to worry about shattered mirrors -- but a deep desire to savor the moment that kept him warm and liquid as he moved. Damen kissed him back with the same touch of languor, and for several minutes they merely lay there in the bed together, the sheets tangled around them, binding them to each other, chest-to-chest. Damen gathered Laurent's hands close to him, holding them between their bodies.

And then something changed, some imperceptible adjustment in one or both of them that seemed to alter the quality of the kiss, so that it moved from light and sweet to deep and hot, sending a rolling, amorphous sensation of warmth through Laurent's entire body.

He didn't gasp into it exactly, but his breath seemed to enter his chest with a tremor, a shake, and Damen pulled back at once, his hands still wrapped loosely around Laurent's. "Are you all right?" he said.

Laurent knew his eyes were wide and dark as they met Damen's, and he nodded with an eagerness he would normally have tried to suppress. What this looked like to Damen, he couldn't begin to guess, but it did at least seem to assuage his nerves that he had done something Laurent's hadn't liked. Very much the opposite.

This time when Damen kissed him, there was that heat beneath the surface from the start, and one of his hands quickly found Laurent's hip from above the blankets, so that they were not yet pressed skin-to-skin, but Laurent felt the spread of Damen's hand over him like it bloomed there, warm even through the heavy bedclothes. He shifted closer over the mattress, and as he did so, Damen hauled him closer to him, until in a moment, their hips were pressed flush to each other, except for the sheets that were still sleep-tangled around them.

Even with the sheets as an impediment, however, Laurent could feel Damen against him, the hard length of him pressing through the layers of fabric. It was enticing and thrilling, and Laurent found himself wanting to find it with his hands, as terrifying a thought as that was.

For the second time, Damen stopped kissing him, and this time Laurent heard himself whine in protest, only for the sound to break off suddenly and turn into a gasp as Damen's attention moved from his lips to his neck. He kissed the tender flesh there softly, and Laurent shivered, clutching at Damen's shoulders.

Had anyone ever touched him there? If they had, he couldn't remember it. Certainly it hadn't felt like it did now, with Damen's soft lips pressed to the place where he might have felt for a pulse. And then those lips parted, as they had done on several other parts of Laurent's body already, and Laurent felt the hot touch of tongue, and then the sharp nip of teeth.

He cried out, wishing silently that none of the servants were in the halls outside his rooms, or they would surely have heard him.

Perhaps he had been wrong about everything. Perhaps there was a devil, and this man had been sent by him to ruin Laurent's eternal soul. Perhaps all of it was true, but as long as Damen didn't move his mouth from Laurent’s neck, he hardly thought he could bring himself to care.

Against the warm curve of his throat, Damen laughed, quiet and low and self-satisfied, and a curl of pleasure unspooled in Laurent's belly in answer. He had perhaps never met anyone as infuriating as Lord Damianos Akielos, and yet he had never before in his life ever felt anything like what he was feeling now. He contained something vast and sprawling inside himself, as huge as the forest outside his window, and all of it -- all of it -- wanted Damen. Wanted to consume him, wanted to ensconce him. Was this what desire was? If so, he had never known it before this moment.

"Laurent," Damen said. His lips were still brushing Laurent's throat even as he spoke, but although Laurent could not see the amusement in his face, he could certainly hear it in his voice. Still, he couldn't bring himself to answer, not right away, and so Damen repeated his name again, and then pressed a kiss right to the base of his throat, in the hollow between bone.

Forcibly, Laurent dragged himself back to coherence, back into his own mind. Damen must have registered the change, because he spoke again.

"Maybe we should slow down," Damen said. He didn't sound as though he were angry about this idea. He presented it simply, as a potential solution to a problem Laurent didn't really understand. He didn't want to slow down. If Laurent was a sprawling, thirsty forest of trees, then Damen was the stream to water his roots. He wanted to drink him all down without stopping. He did not want to slow anything.

Of course, if he tried to put any of this in words, he would undoubtedly have ended a babbling mess, and he couldn't have that. So instead, he took the moment to breathe deeply and gather himself back together.

"Do you want to slow down?" he forced himself to ask, once his body remembered that he was a human being, that he had speech.

Damen pulled back to look at him. No doubt Laurent's face was embarrassingly flushed, his pupils blown wide despite the bright sunlight. He knew his lips were parted, and that he was breathing in shallow bursts despite his best efforts to draw in long, calming breaths. But Damen didn't laugh at him. Rather, his own eyes were wide and guilelessly transfixed on Laurent's face. He didn't say yes and he didn't say no. He said, "It doesn't matter what I want."

Laurent startled, hard enough that both of their bodies moved with it, and Damen rushed to correct himself.

"That's not what I meant," he said. "Of course it matters." He seemed to take his own collecting inhale before continuing. "I don't want to slow down. But I think, maybe, it would be best for you."

Laurent's eyes narrowed. "How should you know what's best for me?" he said.

This time Damen did laugh a little, his face gone somewhat rueful. "All right," he said, but not in a way that meant he was fully on Laurent's side here. Before Laurent could grow grumpy about this, however, Damen's hands were back on his hips, and in one fluid, easy motion he drew their bodies together and flipped them, so that he himself lay on his back against the mattress, and Laurent was sprawled on top of him.

With gravity to drive them together now, they were pressed more tightly against each other than they had yet been. In addition, the sudden motion had caused the blankets to slip away from them, so that now the only fabric between them was their nightshirts, which were thin and fragile almost to the point of being utterly insubstantial in the context.

Laurent froze at the feeling of Damen against him, the undeniable pressure and weight of him, even though Laurent was the one on top. He felt tense suddenly, in a way that was familiar to him, but which had fled from him since the moment they had first begun to kiss beneath the blankets, some timeless number of minutes ago. Damen was looking up at him, his face for once almost completely expressionless, and Laurent understood. Damen was expecting him to back out of this now. He thought that, faced with the stark reality of what was unfolding between them, Laurent would run away.

He felt himself resolve, first on the inside and then on the outside, his face rearranging itself from shock and surprise to determined defiance. Damen would not put him off so easily. "I'm not afraid," he said, his eyes narrowed and a challenge in his voice.

Damen's face melted from the expressionless into fondness. "No," he agreed. "I don't think you ever are." Still, he didn't seem convinced. "A compromise?" he proposed. He must have read Laurent's displeasure in his face or in the tension of his body, because he said, "Laurent. There will be time."

"Unless we die doing the ritual," Laurent argued, though this was petulance, and to his relief, Damen laughed.

"No one is going to die," he said.

"You will leave," Laurent countered. "When it's done. You're going to leave."

Damen did not insult him by brushing this away or by denying its truth. Instead, he thought for a moment, his hands still splayed over Laurent's hips, his thumbs tracing lazy brushes back and forth as he considered.

"I will have to return to Greece for business eventually," he agreed. "But I can stay for a while. And I can visit, if you like, whenever you want. You can visit me too." He drew in a long breath of his own, and for the first time it occurred to Laurent that Damen might be nervous too, that this may not be just another conquest to him, that he might care as much about what happened here as Laurent did himself. "I'm not just going to abandon you."

An anxiety Laurent hadn't recognized released itself suddenly from where it had been clinging in his chest, and before he could give himself the chance to talk himself out of it, he leaned down to kiss Damen in a soft echo of their first, the night before. Chaste and simple, but hopefully communicative.

"All right," he said when he pulled away. "We have time. But, Damen, I --" and before he could think how to put any of it into words, his body spoke for him, pushing his hips down against Damen's, moving into him in a way that would have been nearly impossible to misinterpret. He was hard and leaking against his nightshirt, and he needed -- he didn't even know what he needed.

Damen's face remained soft with affection and amusement as he said, "I'm not going to abandon you now either." He kissed Laurent again then, tightening his hold on Laurent's hips and rocking them down against his own. The movement sent shocks of pleasure through Laurent's body, and in a moment, he was thrusting down to meet Damen motion for motion, until they were rocking against each other, slowly but steadily building the liquid heat between them, stoking it into a roaring flame.

Only then Damen stopped, and not only did he still himself, he tightened his grip on Laurent so that he was forced to stop too. Laurent groaned and allowed his head to fall heavily against Damen's chest. "Damianos," he said, "are you always this insufferable?"

"Believe me," Damen said, very obviously pleased with himself, "I'm usually much worse."

Laurent laughed, but it quickly turned into a groan again as Damen pulled him down, more firmly against him.

"I have an idea," Damen said. "Something that will not be slowing down, but that will let you take things at your own pace."

Unsure he had the capacity to make any argument at all at the moment, Laurent swallowed and nodded. He was pretty sure he would have agreed to anything, but he trusted Damen -- even more now than he had at the start of all this, since Laurent would have followed him blindly into anything, and it was only Damen now looking out for him in his inexperience.

"Come up here," Damen said, shifting his hands so that instead of holding Laurent's hips, they held onto his thighs instead. He urged Laurent to move further up the bed, his knees forced to spread as he climbed up the length of Damen's body.

Once he was straddling Damen's chest, Damen paused to push Laurent's nightshirt up. "Is this all right?" he asked, and when Laurent nodded, he pushed the shirt up over his head and dropped it over the side of the bed. Then he went back to pulling Laurent up. For a moment, as Laurent drew closer and closer to Damen's face, he wondered if Damen was just playing with him after all, waiting to see how far Laurent would go, how far he would allow himself to be pushed, before he would finally catch on.

Before the fear of this had a chance to ignite, however, Damen looked up at him with heavy eyes. "Do you trust me?" he asked, and he tilted his head up just enough that he could brush an open-mouthed kiss over Laurent's inner thigh. And then, glancing again at Laurent to see whether this had upset or offended him, and seeing no trace of any such thing, he leaned in again, and pressed a matching kiss to the pink and leaking tip of him.

Laurent gasped and thrust his hips forward only once before collecting himself into strict control. "Sorry, I'm sorry," he said, but Damen only shook his head as though to wave this aside.

"Do you trust me?" Damen asked again, no trace of impatience in his voice.

"Yes," Laurent said.

"What I'm going to ask you to do might feel strange, but I think you'll like it. All right?"

"Yes," Laurent said again, now quite sure that he would have done anything at all that Damen asked of him, however strange it might seem.

Damen nodded, as though to himself, and then, rather than pulling Laurent further up the bed, he moved himself down it, keeping his hands firm on Laurent's thighs so he wouldn't adjust his own position as Damen moved. Finally, he settled just beneath Laurent, ignoring Laurent's undoubtedly somewhat baffled expression. He didn't try to explain with words. Instead, he released Laurent's thighs, folding his hands behind his head in a gesture that served to both prop himself up slightly and to keep his hands out of the way, where they could exert no pressure on Laurent.

"This way," he said, "you can take it at your own pace, and stop whenever you like."

Laurent didn't have a chance to ask what Damen meant for him to do, exactly, before Damen had wrapped his warm, wet lips around Laurent in a gesture that was utterly shocking in several ways at once. Laurent stared down at him, and he knew he must look ridiculous, but really, what did Damen expect? It took every particle of strength in his body to hold himself still, some primal extinct that was well beyond his understanding urging him immediately to press deeply into the heat of his mouth, which seemed absurd, if not downright horrible, to do.

He was not some wide-eyed innocent, of course. He knew that people often pleasured each other with their mouths. But this was different. This was -- not that. Not exactly. It seemed only fair to Laurent that the person doing the pleasuring was the one free to start and stop as they liked. If he had ever conjured an image of such a thing, it would not have looked like this.

Damen pulled away for a moment to level him with a serious look. "Laurent, remember what I said. We don't have to do this at all."

"But I," Laurent began, and then stopped. It wasn't that he didn't want to do this. Not at all. He simply didn't understand why Damen wanted to. "Are you --" he started to try to ask, but he didn't know how to finish the sentence. Are you okay? Are you sure? Are you completely out of your mind?

But Damen didn't seem to need him to say more than that. He smiled, the easy, brilliant smile which seemed an echo of the very sun. "I want this," he said, sounding so clear and sure about it. "Do you?"

Laurent thought of the debilitating warmth and wetness of him, the all-encompassing sensation he'd had for that drawn-out moment when they had both been still as he battled with himself over what to do. Slowly, he nodded.

"All right then," Damen said. "Take your pleasure," he said, and before Laurent could protest again, he added, "I'll find a way to let you know if I need you to stop."

This, finally, had to be good enough for Laurent, and he nodded again. With that settled, Damen lifted his head again, just enough that he could touch his lips to Laurent once more, parting them so that Laurent could begin the slow press inside.

He forced himself to take it slowly, so that Damen would have ample opportunity to stop him if he wanted to, and so that he wouldn't risk spilling too early. The heat of Damen was immense, as though he really were the sun in human form. And the wet slickness of him made it all too easy for Laurent to slide inside. He had never felt anything touch him here except the dry brush of his own hands, and he could feel himself shaking with the effort of holding himself back from the edge, holding himself back from pressing in as deep as he could go and losing himself in Damen's body, Damen's willingness, Damen's unworried surrender to this moment and whatever Laurent wanted from him.

Eventually, in his slow progression, he reached a point of some resistance and stopped. Damen moaned around him in a sound so desperately filthy that there was no possible way to interpret it as any kind of protest. Somehow, miraculously, he was enjoying this.

Laurent chanced a glance down at what he could see of his face. His eyes were closed, and a flush had finally risen to his cheeks. His hands were still clasped carelessly behind his head, as though the thought that Laurent might push past his body's natural defenses didn't bother him at all. It would, of course, have been perfectly easy for him to free his hands and wrap them back around Laurent's hips, where he could haul him away if he needed to, probably in no more than a couple of seconds. But nevertheless, his utter ease in the situation made Laurent's heart race.

Carefully, he drew his hips back, pulling himself out, dragging himself over Damen's slick tongue as he went. And then, just as carefully, he leaned forward slightly, thinking he could get a better angle if he could brace his hands against the mattress over Damen's head. He must have shifted in Damen's mouth as he did this, because Damen moaned again as he moved. And then, with the leverage offered from this new position, Laurent pressed inside once more.

He began to catch a rhythm now, shifting his hips just slightly, focusing as much as possible on the mechanics of the movements rather than the feeling itself, so that he wouldn't spill immediately into Damen's mouth and regret losing this so soon after being granted it in the first place.

To keep himself focused, he closed his eyes, rocking slowly into Damen's mouth and then out again, concentrating as hard as he could on maintaining control. In the forest of his mind, he was flooding, every stream bed overflowing, every brook spilling over and into the dirt and roots. He was gluttonous and heavy with Damen, and he both never wanted to stop this and wanted to chase down his release. He would keep it going forever; he needed to finish it now. He would crack at the seams with all of the feeling inside him; somehow, he needed to hold himself together.

Finally, he could feel his release creeping up on him, and he forced himself to pull back, and back, until finally he was free from Damen's mouth, and he sat on his heels. "If I don't stop now, I'm going to--"

But Damen cut him off to say, "I want you to."

"You -- want?" Laurent said, and Damen nodded. And certainly his eyes were dark with their black centers and his cheeks were dark with blood. His lips were still parted, and they were wet, and they were waiting. His chest rose and fell with heavy breath. "You're sure?" Laurent said.

"Yes," Damen answered. "And you don't have to be so careful either."

This finally undid the last vestiges of Laurent's resistance, and he moved forward again, pressing himself into Damen's mouth once more. This time, experimentally, when he met that resistance at the start of Damen's throat, he pressed just a little further forward, testing it.

Slightly, with the elasticity of muscle, he felt it give, and then the last of his control slipped away entirely. He drew back and pushed in again, aware of every piece of the intricate interlocking of his body with Damen's all at once. Damen's powerful build beneath him, giving himself over willingly to this, allowing -- no, inviting -- Laurent to use him in this way. And Damen's mouth, hot and perfect around him, the animal feel of his throat working to allow Laurent entrance, against every natural instinct.

It was this, at last, that broke Laurent through the barriers that had remained, and he pressed himself into Damen's throat as his entire body went rigid and stiff, and he curled over Damen's head to clutch hard at the sheets on the bed, his hips rocking in tiny, hard thrusts as he spilled as deeply into Damen's body as he could go.

As soon as it was finished, he pulled his hips back, scrambling up and off of Damen, ashamed of himself for pushing so hard. But before he could utter so much as an apology, he saw that Damen's hands were still held beneath his head, and there was a blissful smile playing on his lips.

And, impossibly, between his legs he was so immensely hard that he was visibly straining and red with it. Laurent lay down beside him once more, one hand already straying over to him, though he held back at the last moment, biting his lip and looking up into Damen's face. Damen was watching him with glistening lips and a small smile, his eyes heavy-lidded and warm as ever.

"You -- you enjoyed that?" Laurent asked, tentatively.

Damen laughed a little and nodded his head yes. He didn't seem particularly inclined to speak. Laurent hoped it was more because of his arousal than because Laurent had hurt his throat.

This time when he reached out his hand, he wrapped his fingers around Damen. Damen responded immediately with a low groan and a forward thrust of his hips into Laurent's grip. Laurent had never touched anyone else before, but he just tried to do what he knew he himself liked, and he watched Damen closely for his reactions, so that he could adjust his grip and his movement according to what Damen seemed to like.

Damen's eyes slid shut, but he tipped his head forward to bury his face in the crook of Laurent's neck. Laurent felt overwhelmed with softness. He wanted to hold Damen and coax him to the edge and over it. A part of him wanted never to crawl out of this bed again, but to stay there forever, as long as Damen stayed with him.

It didn't take long before Laurent tightened his grip just so and Damen gasped, his hips bucking, as he spilled himself over Laurent's hand. As he did so, he pulled back just enough to brush his lips softly over Laurent's before falling back against the mattress, his eyes once more closed and that sleepy, easy smile once more on his face.

Laurent released him carefully and studied the state of his own hand. Just as Damen opened his eyes to glance over at him, Laurent touched a curious tongue to his fingers where Damen had spilled over them. He barely had a chance to register any of it, however, because color suddenly rushed into Damen's face, and he groaned loudly, pressing his face down into the pillows.

"If you're not careful," Damen said, "pretty soon you're going to have another ghost haunting your bedroom."

For a moment, Laurent just stared at him, and then the meaning of his words finally presented itself, and all he could do was laugh. Damen wrapped one arm around his shoulders, pulled him close to his body, and they just held each other, occasionally giggling, until the sun had reached its peak in the sky outside the window.


	5. Chapter 5

Laurent, who had never before struggled to get up in the mornings and begin his days, to tackle the necessary tasks and requirements that his responsibilities demanded of him, even before he was the sole remaining member of the de Vere family, had a new appreciation for how difficult it could be to pry oneself out from beneath the bedclothes when sharing them with another.

However, he and Damen did finally manage to get up, after another extended interval of slow, indulgent kissing.

It was easier, somewhat, once they were out of the bed, to get ready for the day, though Laurent was distracted staring at Damen, since he could now do so openly. Damen seemed more than happy to look his fill as well, and for the first time since Damen had arrived at the manor several weeks earlier, Laurent didn't try to hide his own pleasure in looking at him.

As a result, dressing too took much longer than usual, but Laurent already assumed he would be too distracted today to get any real work done, and from what Damen had said, he didn't think they would be attempting the ritual until that night.

Laurent had something else he needed to do, though. Something he had to get done on his own. So while the process was rather slower than usual, he dressed himself. Quickly, he ran his brush through his hair, though he had no mirror to make sure it looked all right. While he did this, Damen knelt on the floor and gathered up the pieces of broken glass. Laurent would have to send Jord in to sweep around the place, just to be sure there were no small shards left, but it didn't look as though there would be. The supernatural crack of the mirror had left it in almost even chunks.

Out of habit and nerves, Laurent almost slipped out of the room and into the hall without saying a word to Damen. His thoughts were racing, processing everything that had just happened between them while at the same time trying to think through the issues of his haunting -- both the old and the new.

Before he made it all the way to the door, however, Damen saw that he was about to leave, crossed the room in three great steps, and wrapped his fingers gently around Laurent's wrist to stop him from going. He said Laurent's name in that soft, low way he had, and Laurent couldn't help himself. He looked up into Damen's face, thinking vaguely as he did so that he wished to be able to look at it for a very long time to come.

"Are we all right?" Damen asked. And he seemed genuinely nervous about this, as though he might have done what he had done for Laurent just now and have it be met with anything but adoring gratitude.

Laurent couldn't help it. He laughed a little bit, and then he laughed a lot more. Damen's answer to this was merely to wait with his brow slightly furrowed, as though he still thought this might go another way, like Laurent might somehow have come to truly hate him since the events of the night before had begun. Eventually, Laurent laughed long enough that he merely tipped himself forward against Damen's body, embracing him and clinging to the solid warmth of him. When he finally calmed down enough that he could have spoken if he'd wanted to, he instead went up onto his toes and pressed what he hoped was a very communicative kiss to Damen's lips.

"Does that answer your question?" he asked when he pulled back.

Damen grinned, and then rearranged his features to look overly puzzled. "I'm sorry, I must have missed it. Could you repeat yourself?"

So Laurent did.

#

When Laurent finally managed to extract himself from Damen's arms some time later, they were so phenomenally late for any meal time that he had to go down to the kitchen himself to fetch some bread and butter if he wanted to eat at all.

Vannes was there when he arrived, and she made a couple of snippy remarks about how she had worked all morning to set out a pleasant breakfast for Laurent and his guest, only to have it thrown to the dogs when nobody arrived to eat it.

Laurent apologized, but even her attitude, usually sharp if not downright biting, couldn't dampen his spirits after the morning he'd had, and she seemed to know something about it, because behind her remarks and her scoffing, she was hiding a grin of her own. Laurent had never told her or any of the others about his tastes, of course, but he suspected they had their own ideas on the matter, and part of the reason he had chosen them in particular to stay on with him when he'd dismissed the others was that he didn't think they would mind.

He took the basket of baguette and softened butter that Vannes huffily offered to him, and when he ducked out of the room, he heard something that sounded suspiciously like a chunk of stale bread hit the door just after him -- followed by a peel of delighted laughter. He smiled to himself as he made his way back upstairs.

For his first task of the day, he needed to be alone. He had done his best to explain this to Damen without sounding like a mad man. Damen, of course, had listened and nodded gravely and told Laurent that he would stay out of the way while he gathered materials for the ritual that night.

But the problem was, Laurent didn't really know where to start. He chewed on some baguette as he wandered almost idly around the house, thinking to himself.

He had for a long while suspected that it was not only his uncle's spirit who remained in the manor after the fire had taken his life. At first, he hadn't been sure who the other spirit was. It might have been his father, feeling as though he couldn't depart this earthly plane while he still had so much business to attend to. It might have been his mother, unwilling to leave one of her children behind, alone.

Or it might have been Auguste. His brother. His long-time protector. The best friend he had ever had. But he had hardly allowed himself to imagine this, because he'd wanted it so badly. It might all have been a trick of his uncle's anyway, some cunning little ploy to make him feel as though he were safer than he really was.

And so he hadn't let himself truly consider the idea that his brother may not have left him after all. It wasn't until the mirror shattered the night before that he began to allow his thoughts to really form around the idea.

Of course, he knew that too might have been his uncle, throwing a fit that another had been allowed where he had been denied for so long. But the event had not felt malicious to Laurent.

In all of the nights when his uncle's ghost had visited him, there had been a sense about it, a feeling of malevolence, of violence, of something grotesque and incorrect. When the mirror had broken, Laurent had felt nothing like that. Instead, he had felt a flash of what he had been feeling from time to time in other places around the house since the fire: concern. Concern for him, as though it were coming not from inside himself, but from somewhere close by.

And so, finally, he had to consider the possibility that it was not his uncle who had shattered the mirror in a fit of rage. Perhaps it had been Auguste, expressing his concern for Laurent, wanting to make sure that Laurent wasn't doing anything he didn't want to do.

This made all the more sense if it had been Auguste stopping his uncle's attentions from going any further than they had yet been able to go. The only trouble now was that if Laurent was right, he didn't know where to go to look for Auguste. And he had to look for him, had to find him, because he needed to find some way to communicate with him.

Perhaps he should have told Damen about his theory. He did trust Damen, and he knew he might have had some good advice for how to go about what he needed to do now, but somehow he felt that he needed to figure this out on his own. He may have been entirely wrong, but it seemed to him that there was no pre-made, easy answer to this problem.

There was only himself, and his brother. Neither death nor new life had stopped either of them from being who they were at their cores, and that meant that as much as Damen knew about ghosts and the supernatural, he still didn't know as much about this as Laurent did, because no one knew Auguste better.

Laurent ate his baguette contemplatively as he moved through the manor. He thought at first that he should sit down somewhere that Auguste had particularly liked when he'd been alive -- some area of the house where he had spent a lot of time. But Auguste had always much preferred to be outside, riding and playing and taking exercise. Laurent didn't think there was anywhere inside the house where he had especially liked to be. He would go out in all weather, so much did he prefer the outdoors. And while Laurent certainly could have gone out there now to attempt his little experiment, he had so far seen no evidence to suggest that the ghosts could follow him out of the house.

Then he thought maybe he would just try it in Auguste's bedroom, but it didn't feel right. Auguste never did anything there but sleep. Even when he was inside, he didn't spend any time there.

Laurent thought back, remembering where he did see Auguste when he was in the house. In the solarium with their mother, in their father's office discussing business, in the library with Laurent, in the dining room, sitting around the table, laughing and joking and talking with the family. He came inside to spend time with them, almost exclusively. And of course, the dining room was not an option.

Turning on his heel, Laurent headed for the library, deciding that it was as likely a place as anywhere and that it was, at least, worth a try.

The library was one of the only rooms in the house that still looked almost exactly the same even after the fire. It had already been Laurent's domain well before that day, in a way that the rest of the house ostensibly was now, though it never really seemed it. And still hardly a day passed when Laurent didn't find himself there.

In fact, most of its changes had come, by now, not from any results of the fire itself, but from Damen's presence. He had set himself up there on day one, both for his research into Laurent's problem, and to keep in touch with people at his home, to run his own business as well as he could from a distance.

As a result, tables were scattered with some of his things, papers with his name on them were poking out of books on the occult, which were stacked here and there around the room.

It didn't feel like the epitome of order that it had been when it had been Laurent's alone, but as he really looked around the room, he found that he didn't mind it. He didn't mind the gentle touch of chaos that Damen's presence had added. In fact, it felt comfortable and home-like in a way it never really had before. Lived-in. Welcoming. Not just because this was the place where the books were kept, but because it was a place that was worn and well-loved, a place that had welcomed people with open arms, and which was ready to welcome Laurent now, and any time he needed it.

This, at last, felt like the place he needed to be. He set his basket of bread down on one of the tables and moved deeper into the room, finding a small corner where he could tuck himself between two bookshelves. It was such a small space that it would not have been comfortable to squeeze into it with Auguste if he were alive, but he supposed the same rules hardly applied when one half of the pair having a conversation was fully incorporeal.

Snug between the two bookshelves, Laurent allowed himself to simply sit for a moment with the thoughts that were racing through his head. Thoughts of Damen, of Auguste, of his uncle. Thoughts of what life in the manor might be like, once the terror of his nightly visits was finally past him.

Would Damen leave right away? How empty would the house feel, without Damen and without his uncle haunting the halls? And did getting rid of his uncle mean getting rid of Auguste too? Even if it didn't, was it the right thing to do?

Laurent felt himself beginning to school his face to show nothing, and then he laughed at himself. Even if he hadn't been preparing to speak to his dead brother, trying to hide anything from Auguste had always been a lost cause. He couldn't imagine it would be any less so now.

"I'm sorry I haven't talked to you until now," he said out loud, though he kept his voice low. He didn't want to draw the attention of any of the living occupants of the house. "I didn't want to let myself believe you were really here. I didn't want to get attached to do the idea, only to realize that you had never really been here at all. Or, worse, that it was just him. That he was playing with me as he's always played with me."

There was no outward sign that Auguste was present, that he was listening, and yet Laurent didn't worry that he couldn't hear him. Somehow he knew that Auguste was there with him. He sensed his presence, as he had at various times over the last months.

"I know why you broke the mirror," Laurent went on, and he could hear the touch of fond amusement in his voice, and he tried to project it out of himself, so that Auguste could feel him as he could feel Auguste. "You always told me I was over-cautious, right up until the moment when I would decide not to be, and then I would do anything. I know you didn't want me to make a big decision without really thinking about it first. I know you don't want me to get hurt."

Auguste had always been Laurent's protector in life. He supposed it shouldn't have surprised him that he would linger even in death, wanting to keep an eye out for his younger brother. And Laurent couldn't deny that having Auguste here with him, even if he hadn't allowed himself to fully believe it, had been both a comfort and a great help, especially where their uncle was concerned. But he didn't need protecting from Damen, and now Damen had a way that he thought would work to get rid of his uncle, and Laurent needed to know what Auguste wanted to do.

"Thank you," Laurent said, "for looking out for me all these months. But you don't need to protect me from Damen." A sense of amusement that came not from himself at that. Laurent laughed a little. "Or from myself."

He paused for a moment, contemplating how to put what he felt into words. How he trusted Damen, and how he believed that trust to have been earned.

"I care about him," he finally said, "and I believe he cares about me."

Around him, the air seemed to settle, as though something near him had been unsure, and now it had been calmed. He took this to mean that Auguste believed him and understood, which meant hopefully no more broken mirrors. But now he had come to the part of the conversation he was the least sure of.

"I'm not sure how much you know about what we -- Damen and I -- have been working on," Laurent began, recognizing how ridiculous he would have sounded having this entirely one-sided conversation, if anyone had walked into the library just then. But he pressed on, knowing that his brother was beside him, even if he couldn't see him there. "But he's been helping me. With Uncle. And he thinks he's found a way to get rid of him for good. I don't know exactly what's going to happen to him. Where he'll go. Or if he'll just stop. But I wanted -- that is, I thought I ought to ask you, if you want us to do the same for you."

Laurent's voice remained steady, but in his chest, his breath rattled and his throat constricted around mounting emotion.

Now that he was aware and accepting of Auguste's presence here, he didn't want to lose him again. But he didn't know what kind of life a ghost could really have. And he suspected that the only reason Auguste had remained, even when their parents hadn't, was his desire to protect Laurent.

Only Laurent could protect himself now, and once his uncle was gone, he wouldn't need supernatural protection anymore either. It was the right thing to do, to offer Auguste a way out, even if he didn't know what exactly that might look like. He deserved to have the chance to move on, and he deserved for it to be his own choice.

As he sat there quietly, imagining that he was allowing Auguste the chance to think it over, he felt the soft sensation of a warm hand on his shoulder, comforting and familiar, as though Auguste were sitting just in front of him in the small space. With the gesture came an emanation of deep love, but also exhaustion, and Laurent understood. Staying here was hard work for Auguste, and if Laurent didn't need him to watch over him anymore, he knew it was time for Auguste to go.

#

After Laurent's conversation with his brother, Auguste stayed by him for a while, but before long, he seemed to fade. It didn't appear as though he had the energy for long bouts of time spent hanging around, and any time he made any sort of physical manifestation, it drained what energy he did have even faster. Laurent supposed that explained why he would usually go all day without encountering much of anything, and then his nights were so dramatic.

He hung around the library for a little while, processing everything he had thought and understood over the course of the morning so far. Then he got up, gathered the few things he had brought with him, and wandered out onto the grounds.

It wasn't that he was avoiding Damen, but he felt that he needed to be alone for a little while. Damen was probably somewhere inside, getting things ready for that night, most likely pestering Vannes, Jord, and Paschal into helping him gather the materials he would need.

Out here, alone, Laurent allowed himself to smile at the image of Damen strolling boldly through the de Vere manor, putting things together for an arcane ritual as though this were the most natural thing in the world, expecting the help of those around him not out of arrogance (though certainly he had plenty of it) but out of an innate sense that what he was doing was good and right, and therefore everyone would fall in behind him.

There was a power to him that Laurent admired. It was not his own brand of power, not the kind he had spent his life cultivating, but he could and did appreciate it, in more ways than one.

He thought again of that morning, of the drawn-out hours they had spent in bed together, and he was grateful to be alone where no one could see the flush in his face which had far more to do with memory than it did with the slight chill of the day.

Eventually Laurent managed to compose himself enough that his thoughts no longer flipped wildly from place to place, first thinking of Damen and the time they had spent together, and then of his brother, lingering here with him even through death to make sure he was protected, and now ready to go on to whatever came next, and finally of his uncle, who he felt increasingly sure would resist, however he could, his and Damen's attempts to banish him and send him on.

Laurent could only hope that they would be successful, and that wherever they were headed next, his uncle and his brother would not be going to the same place.

Back inside the house, everything felt still and quiet in a way that was familiar, but which had ceased to be common since Damen's arrival. His presence alone gave the whole place an air of frenetic energy, even when he was nowhere to be seen. Laurent could nearly always hear him, moving around a floor below or talking to one of the servants, or laughing at some joke he most likely told himself. Riffling through pages, making little, unconscious hums as he read or worked on a letter to someone back home.

It had driven Laurent crazy at first, to be so ceaselessly aware of him. Now he knew that as soon as Damen left, he would miss it.

Without the sound of Damen's bustling to follow, Laurent didn't know where to look for him. With his hardly noticing, the day had passed quickly. Now the sun had begun to set below the tree line, and Laurent wasn't sure if Damen needed his help setting things up for the ritual. He didn't even know what the ritual would entail -- beyond Damen's assurance that no human sacrifice would be required.

As he searched the house, at first he didn't see any of the servants either. He generally liked to be alone and always had, but since the fire, he'd preferred for there always to be someone else in the house somewhere, and he always liked to know where they were, even if they were not near him. Now he went through the entire manor and didn't see a soul, alive or otherwise.

Finally, he reached the kitchen at the bottom level of the house, and there he found Vannes at least. He asked where everyone else had gone and she shrugged.

Then, in response to the look Laurent leveled at her, she said that Paschal had needed to run to the village for some supplies, and she thought Jord was working out on the grounds somewhere. He asked about Damen, but she said she hadn't seen him, and he hadn't come down to ask for food.

The news that he sometimes sought her out if he needed something to eat at odd hours probably shouldn't have surprised Laurent, but something about the thought of Damen wandering the halls of his family home without accompaniment struck Laurent as strange and slightly intimate.

He thanked Vannes and apologized for barging in on her, and then he continued his search around the house. He had nearly given up when it occurred to him that he hadn't checked his own room, and there at last was where he found Damen, sitting in the middle of the floor with his legs crossed, like a giant child. He didn't seem to have noticed when Laurent entered the room, so he hovered for a moment without making a sound, lingering in the doorway, just watching Damen work. 

It didn't really look much like work, what he was doing. He had a few things spread out in front of him in a little arc over the floor: a couple of small mirrors, a few powders in little stone and ceramic bowls. A dark bowl that appeared to be filled just with water. He had a few trinkets spread out as well, and he appeared to be surveying these as Laurent watched him.

Laurent didn't recognize them immediately, but as he paid closer attention, he realized they were little things that had belonged to his uncle and his parents, things he must have found in his wanderings around the house.

A small compact mirror that had a puff of some soft material inside for cosmetics, which had belonged to his mother. A black, leather-bound book of paper where his father had kept the names and contact information of people he knew through business. And finally a photograph of the whole family, in haunting shades of gray, taken very shortly after his uncle had come to live at the manor, and which Laurent knew he had kept in his chambers, on the small table beside his bed.

Even from here, he could see the wary look in his child self's eyes, already uneasy to be standing so close to his uncle, and feeling so completely alone in his fear and discomfort. Back then, he hadn't had anyone to go to. It was before Auguste had caught on to their uncle's attention, and its less than wholesome motivations, and so Laurent had been fielding all of it himself, at barely thirteen.

In the doorway, he shook his head to clear it, and then he said, to Damen, "Do we need all of those?"

Damen looked up at him, and Laurent could see in the way that he shifted subtly, in the way his expression changed, that he felt the need to be wary around Laurent in this, that he wanted to be careful with him.

In anyone else, this might have sparked anger in Laurent. Hadn't he proven that he could take care of himself? And maybe a few weeks ago, that was exactly how he would have felt. But now, after everything, he knew that in Damen, it didn't come out of pity, but out of genuine care. After all, Damen had proven that when he didn't feel Laurent was being fair, he had no qualms with telling him so, or arguing against him, or laughing at him outright. But when it mattered, when he knew Laurent was really feeling something, he had never been anything but tender and caring.

"Do you know who else is here?" Damen asked, clearly being careful not to sound as though they both knew, and they both knew what they had to do. Laurent understood: Damen was going to let him decide.

"Will it hurt the ritual, to have all of them, just in case?" Laurent asked, more out of curiosity and to buy himself a moment than because he truly thought his parents might be here. He knew they were gone, that they had moved on. It was his uncle and his brother who remained.

Damen seemed to consider the question for a moment, and then he said, "It might muddle it. Confuse things."

"So it would be better to have things only from those who we know are still here," Laurent concluded.

"I think so."

Laurent nodded. Then he pushed himself away from the door with his shoulder and walked across to the bed.

By the time they had finally left it earlier in the day, it had been so late that they'd missed the chance to have it remade for the night, and so all the bedclothes were still mussed and thrown about. Laurent ignored them and instead went right for the pillow on the side of the bed where he had been sleeping. He reached beneath it and pulled out Auguste's knife, the one Damen had given to him on his first night in the room, weeks ago. He held it for a moment, and then he crossed over the floor to hand it to Damen.

Damen took it and looked up at him. "Are you sure?"

Laurent looked down into Damen's face, so openly caring and warm. He nodded, not sure that the words would come if he needed them, but Damen understood and didn't press further. Instead, he added the knife to the spread of small objects, and he took the compact and the small book of contacts away, placing them instead behind him and presumably out of reach of the ritual.

"So what do we do?" Laurent asked, and then he sat down on the floor across from Damen, crossing his legs as well, so that they were facing each other from just a couple of feet apart.

Damen looked startled, as though to see Laurent sitting on the floor was something he never expected to witness. In other circumstances, Laurent would have found that funny. Damen seemed to have some misconceptions about him that he would enjoy discrediting.

"It's fairly simple," Damen said. "We just wait for the sun to go down, the moon to rise. We should have a fire ready. There are some candles to light, a few words to say. It's basic stuff."

"You think it will work?" Laurent asked. He didn't exactly have anything in mind, no preconceived notions of any legitimacy regarding how one would go about purging ghosts from their house. But this seemed almost too easy.

"Well," Damen said, with the tone of someone who was about to say something he suspected may not go over well. "The hard part isn't the ritual itself."

Laurent arched a brow.

Damen sighed and continued. "If they want to go, it should be simple. We're releasing them from what ties them to this place, so that they can move on."

Laurent glanced down at the items in front of them. They had belonged to his brother and uncle, of course, but he didn't think they were exactly what was tying them to the manor. In fact, if the aim was to get rid of what was holding them here, then they would do better to destroy Laurent himself.

"Symbolically," Damen clarified, as though Laurent had spoken any of this out loud. "That's the hard part. Our intentions have to be clear and unclouded. And if either of them doesn't want to go, they may put up a fight."

Laurent stared at him and slowly nodded his head. "How does a ghost fight?" he said after considering it for a moment.

"It can be anything," Damen said. "Throwing things, possessing people. It depends on their strength, and how badly they want to cling to their old life."

Again, Laurent nodded, this time more to himself as he processed this information. He had spoken to Auguste, and so he knew his brother would be ready to move on. He wouldn't put up any kind of fight.

His uncle was another story. He didn't think the man had ever, in life, done anything less than what he wanted, what he had chosen for himself. Even if it proved less perfect than imagined, his pride was such that he would cling to any decision, doubling down and working as hard as it required to turn the tides in his direction, rather than giving up and starting again. Which meant that if he had chosen this for himself, then surely he would dig in his heels to keep from being thwarted.

But it seemed that there was no sure way to know what that might look like, how he might choose to act out and resist them. All they could do was proceed, and hope that when the time came, they could think quickly enough to overcome him.

If it had been anyone else, Laurent would have been confident. However, he had spent years of his life resisting and dancing around his uncle, doing everything he could think of to avoid him or to best him, whatever he thought might keep himself safe for another day. And always, his uncle had been two steps ahead. Laurent had never been arrogant enough to believe that he was winning in the game against him. The man had only ever been playing with him, tormenting him for his own entertainment. Even death hadn't stopped him.

"My uncle will fight," Laurent said to Damen, wanting Damen to know what exactly he was getting himself into. "He'll fight hard. You should know that."

Damen's eyes were on him, heavy in the growing dark of the room. He nodded, and then he leaned forward suddenly to take Laurent's hand in his. They sat there for a quiet moment, both silently acknowledging that they were here together, taking on whatever the night had in store for them side-by-side.

And then Damen let go to finish his preparations, and Laurent went to the fireplace to build a fire, since Damen had said they would need it. For several minutes, they worked quietly near each other, engaged in their separate tasks but companionably working toward the same goal. Outside the windows, the sky had turned to blue-black, and the full moon glowed white, surrounded by a nimbus of light and stars.

Before long, the only light in the room came from the moon, the small fire Laurent was steadily growing beneath his ministrations, and the few candles Damen had lit around himself, illuminating the items he had spread out over the floor. The result was a dim, flickering cast of golden light from the fire that mixed with the cool light of the moon, somehow both different and the same. All light, made of the same incomprehensible stuff, and yet different in every aspect of their appearance.

He looked over at Damen, who had his back to the fireplace and to Laurent. He was bent over the book where he had found the description of the ritual. It didn't look familiar to Laurent, which made him think it had probably come from Damen's own library back in Greece, or perhaps it was one he had purchased since he'd come here. More than once, packages had arrived for him from the town.

It was before Laurent had really begun to get to know him, and so he had never asked about them. He squinted through the dim light and saw that the writing was neither in French nor in Greek. It was Latin. He laughed a little to himself. His own classical education had left him with some ability in Latin, but it seemed Damen could read it fluently, if the way his finger flew over the page was any indication.

For a few more minutes, they remained silent as they worked, Damen reading through the ritual once more, and Laurent gently stoking the flames in the fireplace. After watching Damen for a while, he turned his eyes to his work. It was strange, but any fear he had felt of fire before the one that had claimed the lives of his family had left him after that day.

It wasn't that its power had been sapped by the event. Far from it. He felt he had a much stronger understanding now than he ever had before of just how much damage a fire could do, and how quickly.

But somehow having it affect his life as much as it had -- taking his parents and his brother away from him, damaging his hands permanently -- had left him feeling less afraid of it than he had been before. As though he knew it could never hurt him that badly again, and so there was no more reason to fear it the way he had, the way most people did.

It had also, however, taken its own beauty away from him. He could no longer appreciate it in quite the same way as he once had.

Laurent didn't know exactly what had changed, whether it was only that he'd finished reading through the ritual or if the fire had been built up enough to suit him or if it had simply reached the right time of the night, but eventually, Damen straightened up and said, "All right," and Laurent understood that it was time to begin.

He moved away from the fire to sit across from Damen once more, ready to do as Damen directed. At first the whole thing felt a little silly. He could tell, somehow, that they were alone, that neither Auguste nor his uncle were present in the way that they sometimes were. He didn't always know they were there, of course, but now, he could tell that they were not.

Damen took both of Laurent's hands in his for a moment, and merely held them, squeezing gently, rooting him in the moment. "Are you ready?" he said.

"Yes," Laurent answered, and as soon as he did, something settled over him, heavy and aware.

They were not alone anymore.

It was as though his stated intention to begin had summoned whatever it was, exactly, that had been tormenting him through all of the past long months. Auguste, too, he thought was there, but his presence was swamped, dwarfed by the larger, angrier sense of his uncle.

"They're here," he said, making sure his voice came out clear and strong.

Damen nodded and released his hands.

It was as he said. The ritual itself was simple. Damen told Laurent to focus his thoughts, his intention, on his brother, to look at the knife that had once been Auguste's, and to imagine him as he had been in life, and as he knew him now, focusing all of it onto the knife. As Laurent did this, as he sought out the feeling of Auguste in the room around him and held onto it, Damen read from the Latin book.

Laurent worried for a moment that Auguste might put up a fight after all, might insist that they try to get rid of their uncle first, so that he could help. But maybe he understood that it would be easier for them, clearer, if they were able to free him first and then focus their full attention on the one remaining spirit. In any case, as Damen reached the end of the passage in his book, Laurent gently picked up the knife from where it had been resting on the floor, and then crossed the few steps to set it into the fire.

For a long moment, there was nothing, only a sense of the room, the malicious presence of his uncle all around, and just beneath it, the quieter, calmer presence of Auguste. Now that he was allowing himself to fully accept it, he didn't know how he could ever have doubted that his brother had been with him all along.

Then, as the knife sat in the fire, nearly glowing, Laurent felt a sudden pulse of deep, affirming love, which seemed to come both from the fire itself and from all around him. It was overwhelming, and he felt it everywhere. It brought tears to his eyes immediately, tears that seemed only partially to belong to him. This was Auguste, he understood, saying goodbye.

And sure enough, after a moment, the sensation faded, and with it, the sense of Auguste's presence. He was gone.

"It worked," Laurent told Damen, since he imagined Damen probably hadn't felt it quite as strongly as he had, if at all.

Damen nodded, and already he was moving on. Perhaps he thought it would be best to get right to it, so Laurent's uncle would have as little chance as possible to resist. Laurent didn't blame him. He could feel the malevolence in the room increasing fervently.

Maybe Auguste had helped to tamp it down, or maybe his uncle simply knew that it was his turn. Either way, the feeling of it was coalescing, growing all around them, until it was so strong that Laurent doubted Damen couldn't feel it, even if his connection to the spirit wasn't as strong.

Laurent met Damen's eyes, and he knew there was fear in his own face. Somehow, he felt better seeing it reflected in Damen's. Despite the fear they both felt, however, Damen didn't hesitate. He began reading through the passage again, and this time Laurent focused his memories and his feelings about his uncle onto the photograph of his family.

As he looked at it, it slowly began to turn on the floor, until it was facing him instead of Damen, so that all of the members of his own family seemed to be staring up at him. And then other things began to move. Different pieces of the ritual were tipped over, so that the candles guttered out, the small pots of various powders and the bowl of water spilled. When none of this seemed to stop the power that was growing around Damen and Laurent, other things in the room began to tip over and fall to the floor, some of them crashing and breaking as they landed.

In moments, everything that was left out in the open around the room had been knocked over or otherwise destroyed, but Laurent never let his focus waver from the photograph, and Damen never stopped reading the passage from his book.

Finally, he reached the end, and Laurent felt the presence of his uncle swell menacingly all around him. He supposed, given the primary manifestations of his uncle's haunting, he should not have been surprised to feel the grip of phantom hands on his arms as he reached for the photograph.

And then, when their tight grip around his upper arms was not enough to stop him, in his hair, wrapping into it and holding him firmly back. But Laurent had been fighting his uncle for a very long time, and it seemed he had exhausted himself with his tantrum: whatever powers he used at night to keep Laurent still and unable to resist in his bed, he could not seem to summon now.

Laurent grit his teeth against the sharp pain in his head, the duller, deeper pain of strong fingers digging into his shoulder, and he grasped the photograph in his own stiff hand, using his other to drag himself forward across the floor.

Damen had gone back to reading from the book, starting again at the beginning of the passage. His voice had grown stronger, as though he too had to fight against some resistance of Laurent's uncle, and together they fought their private battles with him, Damen forcing his voice to ring clearly through the room, which was whipping with wind now through the windows that had banged open, and Laurent forcing his body across to the waiting fire.

Every inch he gained of ground resulted in more pain as his uncle found new ways to fight his forward progression. Halfway there he seemed to realize that he was no longer bound by the realities of the human body, and the sensation of hands in Laurent's hair and on his shoulder faded, instead sinking into him until he had to fight against his own body in order to move at all. When he resisted, there was agony, but still he pushed.

And then, when he was almost there, a new and excruciating sensation came over him, and he understood what he was feeling at once, as his entire body seemed to light up from the inside and he felt rather than heard himself scream against it.

He was feeling what his uncle had felt, what all of his family had felt, that day in the fire. His uncle's ghost remembered the pain, and through his possession of Laurent's body, he was able to make Laurent remember it too, make him feel it as though he had been engulfed in fire here in his own bedroom.

This, finally, stopped him. He knew distantly that he had fallen over, curled into himself, as though his body wanted to protect him but couldn’t, as the pain came from the inside. There could be no protection from that.

" _ Laurent _ ," he heard Damen's voice say, calling to him through the wind and the pain, desperate and unable to do anything to help.

But his voice was enough. It reminded Laurent where he truly was, and even though he could not shake off the sensation of the flames, the reminder that he was not in a burning dining room about to die with his parents and his brother, that he was in fact in his own bedroom with Damen -- Damen who cared about him, who had come here to help him, who had held him and treated him tenderly -- it was enough to send him crawling over the last desperate inches to the real fire, where he near-blindly threw the photograph and watched it go up in flame.

As though in answer, the flames inside him roared, and somehow the agony grew to meet their renewed strength. He screamed again, but beyond that he no longer knew what his body was doing. He had so often, in his life, felt as though his mind and his body were two separate beings, and now it was truly as though they were, as though his body had its own mind controlling it, entirely separate from him.

Around him, there was nothing but fire and loathing. And then, finally, miraculously, there was nothing at all.

#

For an indeterminate amount of time, Laurent believed that he was dead.

He thought, at first, that there was nothing. That he was nothing. That he didn't even really have a consciousness anymore, and he was merely floating through a void. Then he realized that if he was conscious of the fact that he was floating through a void, he clearly had a consciousness after all. That was interesting, as he had always presumed (until recent events anyway) that to die meant simply to stop.

Then he became aware of a dull ache in his shoulder, a scratching itchiness in his palms, and he realized that he was likely not dead after all, because even if he went on having a consciousness after death, surely he would not go on having a shoulder.

He opened his eyes and found himself lying on the floor of his bedroom, on said aching shoulder. He tried to shift and found that his initial understanding of his position was not quite accurate: he was not just on the floor, but partially held up by something large and warm and comforting, something that stopped him from being able to move freely. Instead of turning his body, he turned his head, until he could see Damen's anxious face looking down at him. Before he could stop himself, Laurent smiled, and as soon as he did so, Damen smiled too.

"You terrified me just now," Damen said.

Laurent continued looking at him for a moment, and then he pushed himself to sit up, though he stayed close to Damen's comforting, solid presence. "I could feel the fire," he said, by way of explanation.

Fortunately, Damen didn't seem to need to hear more to understand. He nodded, and then he took one of Laurent's hands in his and just held it there for a long moment. And then, as though this was not enough to satisfy him, he lifted Laurent's hand and pressed a gentle kiss to the knuckles.

Laurent felt his body relax in response to the gentle sweetness of the gesture, the last dying embers finally fading out of him. "I suppose it worked then. He's gone?"

Damen nodded, his eyes trained on Laurent's face.

Laurent felt a beat of pure relief, at the thought of finally being free from his uncle, and then a beat of pure sadness, at the thought of finally losing the last of his brother. And then he said, "Thank you. For all your help." He couldn't quite bring himself to ask the question, but he felt it hanging in the air between them.

"I told you, Laurent," Damen said. "I won't abandon you."

Laurent allowed these words to sink into him, soothing as a balm. And then he leaned forward, close to Damen, feeling a smile forming as he did so. "Good," he said. "You've proven yourself useful to have around."

Damen laughed. "I'm pleased to be of service," he said, tipping his head in a gesture clearly meant to invoke a bow.

"You're insufferable," Laurent told him, though he was laughing now.

In answer, Damen drew Laurent back into his arms. Laurent managed to grab some of the blankets off of the bed as he tumbled down onto him. He had a feeling they would not be moving from the floor for the rest of the night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so, so much for reading! I had a lot of fun writing this one, and I really hope you had fun reading it. If you feel at all moved to leave a comment, I would truly appreciate it so much!


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